The Zookeeper

Four Sopranos and Two Percussionists

This single-movement chamber cantata is a vocal fantasia or dreamscape of sorts. An instrumental fantasia in the Baroque period is a quasi-improvised piece that often takes a single musical idea as a point of departure, "spinning out" melodies and counterpoint based on that idea. This piece likewise takes the idea of a zookeeper with a zoo in his mind and spins it out into a wandering, stream-of-consciousness dreamscape, venturing whimsically into the depths of human emotions. The text is by Zach T. Power, a fellow graduate student at Brigham Young University. The full text can be found here.