On Setting Texts

Recently, as I have been working on my latest piece, a Biblical oratorio for unmixed voices and four antiphonal Balinese Gamelan ensembles (the provisional title is Oombayahamanasqotsi, which is a composite word I derived from several native languages of the aforementioned island -- the meaning of which I will leave for any competent linguist to decipher), I have been forced to grapple with one of music's most challenging elements: text-setting.

Simply writing music to fit a text is fairly trivial, of course, but I expect more of myself than a mere illustration or accompaniment to the words of some other individual -- in this case, King David, or as biblical historians now generally acknowledge, some underpaid hack that was forced to ghostwrite psalms for him while he carried on with vulnerable foreign immigrants' women.