Craig Carnahan's "Domination of Black," for soprano and piano, was written for baritone and AIDS sufferer William Parker's AIDS Quilt Songbook project. This project aimed to gather a literature of composers' responses to the spread of the AIDS virus, with the hope of using it to raise funds for research. Carnahan's text is by Dan Conner, and comes from a volume called Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop. Carnahan builds the music for this work on its opening motif, two notes repeated with a jump upwards, and its inversion. Though later both a vague waltz and stereotypical dream scales are introduced, most of the music takes the motif as its source. This gives unity and a sense of concreteness to a poem which is, after all, about a dream. The musical work is done by the piano, under the soprano; the soprano mainly narrates, except for the few words Carnahan wants to emphasize, like "sing" and "storm." Conner's poem is not perfect, but Carnahan's music serves it exceptionally well, and the song is more than the sum of its parts.

© Andrew Lindemann Malone, All Music Guide