Venus Unhinged is a song cycle about the risks of romantic love. I was spurred to write the cycle after coming across Eliza Griswold’s bitingly funny and dark poem ‘Epithalamion’, written from the perspective of a jilted woman to her ex-lover on his wedding day. The other three songs also portray the dangers of love — chaos, lack of control, heartbreak, profound longing for a lost love, and loneliness. The final song in the cycle, ‘Tigers”, concludes that romantic love is an inescapable compulsion of the human species and that we must “let go” despite the “tigers above and below.” The cycle uses poetry by Eliza Griswold and Margaret Atwood.

Venus Unhinged was commissioned by the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire.