Will Rowe

Soprano and Chamber orchestra 2(2+picc)2(2+EH)2(2+bcl)2(2+cbsn) - 2221 - timp, 2 perc, pno, hp - soprano solo - strings

Composer's Note:

5 Views Re/Dux is a set of short poems by Catherine Fletcher, who I met and collaborated with at the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in the summer of 2015. Published in Poetry Wales, the poetry riffs on various lines from Peter Finch’s Five Views of Wales, in which Catherine sets the text taken from Finch’s work as the titles of each poem in 5 Views Re/Dux, and uses them as the springboard for her ideas in the body of each poem. Each poem in the set is a series of puns on the title, and thus less a narrative of Finch’s ideas, but more a series of images inspired by the colorful diction he used.

The original setting of 5 Views Re/Dux was written for the Fontainebleau Ecole d’Art Americaines in 2016 for soprano, cello and piano. In that setting, I sought to emphasize these collections of images that Catherine procured in sonic form, adding additional dimension to the text. Since wordplay is one of my favorite forms of expression, it was a text I could relate to easily. I knew as soon as she interpreted “As Spoken” as “ass poken” that there was not only a great opportunity for musical comedy, but also multiple layers of opportunities for text painting given the relationship between the poems and their titles.

In the orchestral setting of 5 Views Re/Dux, I was given the possibility to add even more depth to the text painting. For example, in Rippled Drum (Bard) I was able to make the wave sounds (depicted as unsynchronized oscillations of two notes in various instruments) more prominent as well as more nebulous, the falling gestures in Poor Holding (Vicar) more dramatic, the color of the Scottish pastiche in Coated Macadam (Mender) closer to that of traditional folk instrumentation, the “ass” in As Spoken (Arrows) even fartier, and the black tar heroin portion of Tar Rock (Mine) even more disoriented and dreamy. Though there has been a long evolution of these ideas from Finch’s Five Views of Wales to the orchestral setting of Five Views Re/Dux, the snippets that Catherine blossomed in her own fashion allowed the chance to aurally animate a series of hilarious, bizarre, and colorful collection of images.