Commissioned by Emily Marvosh

8.5 x 11" (PDF)

Text and Music by Scott Ordway

In his Symphony No. 3 (1896), Gustav Mahler creates an elegant framework for understanding the relationship between spirituality and the natural world that in- spired and sustained him. After a monumental first movement evoking the beauty and terror of nature, he ascends by steps through five ways of knowing the world: the distinctive wisdoms of flowers, animals, humanity, angels, and love.

What You Tell Me (2023) is a companion piece to Mahler’s third symphony and is scored for alto voice and piano. The text is based on an extended conversa- tion between me and alto Emily Marvosh—who commissioned and premiered the work—in which she discussed her rela- tionship to each of the themes proposed in Mahler’s symphony. Working from a transcript of this conversation, I extracted and adapted the poetic text for the song cycle.

Although I took each line of the text directly from our discussion, the final poem is shaped considerably by my own interests and sensibilities, as well as by my desire to fashion a concise and concentrated poetic text out of a wide-ranging conversation that lasted more than two hours. The authorship, therefore, rests somewhere in between Emily and me.

Thematically, the piece treads ground that is important to me and which has always attracted me to Mahler’s work: the eleva- tion of everyday experience to a state of beauty, the powerful emotional resonance of small details, the profound lifelong importance of childhood memories, and the connection between nature and my own spiritual experience.