Touch Me by Tom Cipullo

Tom Cipullo's setting of the Stanley Kunitz poem Touch Me remains one of my all-time favorite songs. You can find the complete poem here. Soprano Rachel Schultz and pianist Dimitri Dover's understated performance from SongFest in 2012 brings the song to life beautifully:




Stanley Kunitz was 90 years old when he wrote Touch Me. A recent article by Roger Angell in the New Yorker looks at the way that one's outlook changes entering the10th decade of life:

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night...Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.