Jason Carl Rosenberg, Composer

The Sheltering Cave is the aria of a 15 movement composition for 6 voices and 4-channel tape called Fantastic Architecture.  Although there are only 10 pitches used (other than grace notes), each with an attached phoneme, this solo is intended to be dramatic, elaborate, dark, and, like most traditional arias, inward looking & personal.  When writing The Sheltering Cave, I had in mind someone lost and confused, removed from the world.  The piece symbolizes the feeling of hibernation, when one is unsure when to come out of their secure, yet lonely, space.

 

"A cave as an entity does not let itself be clearly grasped in the sense that a boxlike room is easily apprehended and measured at first glance.  Rather its charm lies in the indefiniteness of its bounds, in the elusiveness of its volume which evades description, in its shapelessness, and in the predominance of the bizarre and whimsical."

(Taken from Ulrich Conrad’s and Hans G. Sperlich’s book, Phantastische Architektur.)