Life, Death and Cow Pies (2024)
five songs in four minutes
Score available for purchase at JW Pepper and Sheet Music Plus. See below for details.
1. What Planet?
2. Wings: Life, Death and Machines
3. Fleeting Youth
4. Death?
5. A Painting
(Nancy Bachmann – words and music)
Title: Life, Death and Cow Pies
Instrumentation: med/high voice, piano
Date of Composition: 2024
Duration: 4 minutes
Program Note
Composed in 2024, these songs are miniature musings inspired by a hike through the Contra Loma Hills in the Delta area of Northern California. The many miles of trails are shared with grazing cattle.
Although the five songs and can be performed separately as very short novelties, my intent is that they be sung in order, as a set.
I. What Planet?
Hardened from rains long past,
the rough, cow-cratered pathway
is dotted with fertilizer pies,
bleached moon-white by the sun.
II. Wings: Life, Death and Machines
From the pinnacle
looking down
a fluttering sparrow,
a vulture soaring smooth…
across the river an army of windmills
with motionless wings.
III. Fleeting Youth
Young joggers chatter cheerfully
as they pass
down the way the sun catches a reflective surface,
a blinding flash,
and they are gone.
IV. Death?
Three cows on the crest of twilight
hurry on the downward way,
disappear to the other side…
V. A Painting
Distant dots of Black Angus,
vetch and mustard flower brushed
across vast, velvet-green canvas,
too beautiful to be real.
Life, Death and Cow Pies