I became acquainted with Marie’s Howe poetry in 2012 when I set her Annunciation as part of a large choral work. When in 2014, Sasha Cooke asked me to write a piece for her Carnegie Hall recital, I probed deeper into Howe’s works and discovered that Annunciation was the last of a set of five from her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. So taken was I by the whole set, I decided to make a song-cycle out of it even if that meant “resetting” Annunciation, which— read as the apotheosis of the p...