Songs from the music theater piece D’Arc: woman on fire, from composer/performer Jay Cloidt and writer/singer Amanda Moody. Performers include Grammy-nominated Kronos Quartet cellist and co-founder Joan Jeanrenaud, along with pianist Jon Herbst, guitarist Will Bernard, and cellists Danielle DeGruttola and Elaine Kreston. 2009.

The songs on D’Arc include a newly-written hymn setting of 14th-century lyrics, delicate acoustic duets for voice and cello, solo cello movements, and intense electronic music. Cloidt skillfully weaves musique concrète elements together with electronic elements and acoustic instruments to support the voice and cello parts.  Moody’s vocal performance runs the gamut from medieval hymn singing to gospel wailing to full operatic bravura, and Cloidt has set her lyrics to an extremely wide range of vernacular styles and semi-abstract electronic textures. The music and lyrics are intense and intelligent, yet emotional and accessible.

Weaving the threads of the Dark Ages with our own dark times, D’Arc depicts a present-day intercession by Saint Joan of Arc in the life of Joanne, a contemporary American mother whose daughter vanished while working abroad in a war-torn region. Years have gone by, with no word of the girl, and Joanne – an agoraphobic – monomaniacally persists in tracking her whereabouts from her small apartment. Answering a prayer, St. Joan intrudes into Joanne’s tightly circumscribed world in bizarre visions, many of them revealed through song, challenging Joanne to listen to the call of her own life. Slowly, Joanne comes to grips with her daughter’s fate. D’Arc follows her inquiry into the costs of dreams, lived and unlived.