Last Ditch Fight of the Wish is an extended work for treble voices. The text by San Francisco poet Denise Newman is exploratory, ruminative, hinting at its subject (individual freedom and what gets in the way of our being so) rather than stating it. As such, the music reflects those characteristics. The piece is in three sections: a dreamy litany where the prhase “not as you / we / I wish. . .”, followed by a more sharply defined section full of questions (“What’s a. . . ?”) and finally coming to rest on the words
We are
as we wish
as we always
will want
to be
free
which eventually fade away into a closed mouth humming from the choir.