Wolf Skin Tenor Voice - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.826964

"Wolf Skin," a song originally written for male voice, upright bass, and piano, was written to accompany a prose poem of the same name by Mary McMyne, which originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review and was subsequently reprinted as the title poem in McMyne's Elgin-Award-nominated collection (Wolf Skin, Dancing Girl Press, 2014). The lyrics and music retell the Little Red Riding Hood folktale from the huntsman's perspective, putting the listener into the position of the hero in the Brothers Grimm variant as he enters the grandmother's house. "Inside," the baritone sings, "the shadows shape a riddle, a story. The half-burnt candle in the kitchen, the unwashed dishes. The cloth-covered basket by the door." With these lines, we travel into the grandmother's house with the huntsman, the bass conjuring the "strange buzzing sound" of the wolf's snores, the piano manifesting the huntsman's realization of what happened before he arrived. The discord between the three voices in the trio, like the poem, questions the classic tale, interrogating the familiar trope of huntsman as hero at the same time as it pays homage to Franz Schubert's Erlkönig with its driving rhythm and dark tone.