Unaccompanied SATB (2023)
1. Will you come?
2. Interval
3. The Lofty Sky
Commissioned by Hereford Chamber Choir for their ‘Dymock Poets Re-imagined’ project, and first performed at the 2023 Ledbury Poetry Festival, in St Michael & All Angels Church, Ledbury on 8th July 2023.
The poetry of Edward Thomas has been an important influence on me since I discovered it in my mid-late teens. I have always felt, however, that most of his poetry almost resists the idea of musical setting, and as such I have set only a couple of his poems (sometimes purely instrumentally such as in my response to the poem The Unknown Bird).
For these three settings I have chosen poems which have a clearer, simpler, more Frost-like structure (with the slight exception of the third poem The Lofty Sky), and I feel I have finally succeeded in composing settings that compliment rather than impose on Thomas’s subtle and profound poetry.
Having grown up in the Dymock area (where Frost encouraged Thomas to begin writing poetry), and having written these settings during a time when my father was dying – this short choral song-cycle also has a particularly personal resonance for me.
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