Mark O'Connor Sheet Music - Official Website - MarkOConnor.Com - Violinist - Composer

Poem for Carlita

This is a piece written for my wife Carla, and was the first piece I composed after moving back to the West Coast in 1999. This music is dedicated to my wife Carla and is all about love and romance. In contemporary vocal music, there is a form called a story song. It is an odd form in that it does not contain any departure from the central idea; therefore there is no "return." The story has a beginning and ending but uses subtle variation to push the idea along its way...much the way loving relationships evolve.

The equivalent of the story song in classical music is a Poem, and this is what I have called this piece. An inspiration I used for my musical poem was the ocean and it's repetition of waves as they fall in to the shoreline. I grew up near the ocean and remember how the sounds of the relentless waves used to calm me. While it was the repetitive sound of the sea that moved me as a child, today, I observed that each wave was not the same but in fact slightly different. I was amazed that it seemed that no two waves looked or sounded the same to me. This natural occurrence seemed to mirror my love for my wife Carla. Each day was just something a tiny bit different. It was very natural to make these kinds of life experience connections. Bridges that joined nature, love and art.

The poem begins slowly and inquisitively and builds through in intensity with loud and mightily passionate moments of emotion before the music comes down peacefully and reflectively, until the last statement played by the violin signifies that the sea is calm once again.

Level: Intermediate / Advanced.