In the spring of 2010, I was contacted by poet and Cornell University English Professor, Alice Fulton — whose poems I had set to computer music several years earlier — about undertaking a similar project with the second-year MFA poetry students in Cornell’s Creative Writing Program. A dozen poems were submitted for consideration, from which four — each by a different poet — were selected for this collection. The poems were chosen for their contrasting content and style, allowing for a variety of approaches in the computer music setting as well. Specific references in the text provided the impetus for many of the processed sounds (e.g., cars and dogs in the Pityk poem, birds and rain in the Garcia poem); in some cases, the text reading itself provided the source material (this occurs to some degree in each setting, though the computer music in the Atsitty poem is based entirely on a reading of the text by the poet).

Cornell Set was commissioned by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at Cornell University. The work was first performed by poets Tacey M. Atsitty, Clayton Pityk, Benjamin Garcia, and Elizabeth Rogers on 15 April 2011 at Cornell University. It is included on the album Improbable Encounters (innova 873, 2014).