X Marks the Sirens

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Instrumentation: Mezzo-Soprano and Fixed Media
Duration: 5 minutes
Recording Available: Yes
Performed: Yes
Catalog ID: RE1053
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X Marks the Sirens was written for and dedicated to mezzo-soprano, Katherine Crawford. This composition was completed in my home studio in July, 2013. My heartfelt thanks to acclaimed poet and my colleague, Jackie White, for supplying a beautiful text.


Recorded at the Kansas City Kansas Community College Recording Studios, the recording above features mezzo-soprano, Katherine Crawford.

She was what she was
and she knew it.
Fate is often like that.
People don't change.

At the end of her DNA,
an added twist, vixen
gene, where it was
written: men will love

you but you can't
keep them; she took
blue & yellow to green
her colors, but they

saw only red. Her heart
became a shack
for bits of the dead
because the myths repeat

your body will sing
them toward you; their
bodies will break
against rock. A trickle

separates desire, love, or
so it is said. She goes on

crooning: I do not wear
the scent of flowers but flesh,
its musk draws in your animal,
into my hum-howled breath:

Sometimes you have to shut up;
unbelieve what you've read.

Mike McFerron with Alice Brown after the performance of X Marks the Sirens at the 2014 2014 Electronic Music Midwest Invitational mini-Festival