I'm just over the halfway point in the piece's form - just over one month to go. Over New Year's in New York I heard a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers by singers from Tenet, the vocal group that will work with Metropolis Ensemble on the premiere of my new work. I was struck by the compelling purity of their voices. I have used this sound before in my two works By the Streams of Babylon and Awakening Galatea - with fewer singers - and I'm building upon that now. Over the break I also had a final consultation with Andrew Cyr - the conductor of Metropolis Ensemble, and my main collaborator for this project - in which we finalized the instrumentation and the program choices for April 7 in Symphony Space (we are planning an entire half program of my music).

I've shaped my own ensemble over time based upon what I want to do expressively. It's rare for a composer to have this liberty - - usually we are told what forces we will be writing for with each new commission. I've arrived at three soprano voices, two percussionists, harp, piano, violin, and double bass. This choice of instrumentation is very personal - - I've never heard a piece with this instrumentation before.

To be right in the middle of this work is to feel incredible blessings, gifts, and richness every day, and also to feel like a force has invaded my mind and body - not an alien force, but a very specific one that takes over everything, almost every thought, insisting that each note and gesture be right and not letting me go until it is. The pressure-cooker feeling rarely goes away. Soon studio lessons will resume at NEC, and I will travel for two premieres in early February - one with the Winnipeg Symphony (on a program with Penderecki) and one with a contemporary ensemble in Montreal, so each day is precious.

Musically, I have managed to cultivate and maintain a certain transparency in my textures; my goal is to hold onto this clarity as I see the form through. A pulse runs through the piece - a heartbeat, or stars: the ones in the poem that I am setting where it says, 'and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.' It is fulfilling to me to hear this inflected pulse become so continuous, guiding me to where it needs to go, and showing me that there is only one single 'right' way for it to unfold.

I've internalized the three texts that I'm setting, and their inter-relationship is evolving, getting refined each day; I rejoice in how one nuance of text overlaps subtly, unexpectedly with another, or in how one text answers another. This is what I was hoping would happen when I had the idea of writing a macaronic motet. Using three languages simultaneously somehow makes sense in 2011, because it captures the polyglot, overlapping of cultures of today in which different linguistic and cultural strands somehow remain distinct.

Beyond that, there is an expressive need for the three texts. One voice is not enough; I need three to enrich and comment upon each other. Each has its own rhythmic metabolism and intervallic palette. The English text, but cummings, says: 'I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart) I am never without it' and then the Hebrew text (a poem by Yehuda Halevi) overlaps elegantly, on its own distinct path: 'Let my beloved come into his garden'. Let us imagine for a second that the beloved is from another culture; this song adapts the language of the beloved, trying for a rapprochement.

When the English voice sings: 'and whatever is done by only me is your doing', the Hebrew phrase intertwines with it, saying: 'let my beloved prepare his seat and his table, to gather roses in the garden'. The Latin voice unfolds in the alto underneath, archaic, lively, and mysterious: the setting of a fragment from a Catullus poem bragging about the magnificent speed and soundness of a boat. All three voices sing about vessels or act as vessels themselves; and the percussion instruments, including prayer bowls, are mostly containers. The title for the piece revealed itself to me the other day: it will be called "Vessel".