Soon
program notes

In the small town where I live (Roosevelt, New Jersey), we have been
fighting to maintain the rural character of the community in the face of
increasing pressure to "develop" and suburbanize.  The poem Soon
was written by one of my neighbors, Mike Hamilton, and I read in the
rather hopeful lines a chance to describe in sound my impressions of how
man's dreams (in this case, the selfish dream of real estate and development
profit) can turn into nightmares.  All of the percussion in the piece came
from the sounds of my daughter Lian's set of Tinkertoys.  I digitally
recorded the Tinkertoys into my NeXT computer and used various
signal-processing and compositional algorithms to manipulate their sound
and generate the rhythms heard in the music.  The reader for the poem was
Mike Hamilton.

The text of the poem: