A piece of music can sometimes be an attempt to render a portrait.

Last week, I shared “The Vitality of Émilie,” a portrait of the youthful energy and spirit of a friend, comprising the final movement of a work entitled “Five Women.” The music tried to portray just one aspect of another's complex personality. No music could hope to catch the entirety of the person.

Next week, I’ll share the movement I wrote in trying to portray an aspect of another friend, mezzo soprano Diane Haslam.

This week I want to share one of the 28 songs I wrote for Diane when she lived in Cincinnati and we were close friends and formed a composer-singer partnership. I wrote songs; Diane sang them in recitals. It was wonderful.

Diane and her husband moved to Aiken SC where she flourishes as a choir director, singer and teacher. I was very sorry to see her go and I continue to miss her very much.

Each song I wrote for Diane was an attempt at a portrait of some aspect of her personality. But I was always conscious that, however good the song might be, it fell far short as a portrait.

When I was looking for texts to set to music for her to sing I came upon a poem, “The Net,” by Sarah Teasdale, about that very subject: no song I might have written could ever have "told all you are.”

How could it? We are mysterious to one another, even to those closest to us. It’s the way things are set up. We share what we can, perceive what we can, knowing we’re separated in the fog of being and that the fog is never going to lift.

It renders all the more precious the tenuous connections we do achieve with those we love.

To hear Susan Olson’s beautiful delivery of The Net from Teasdale Songs, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.