Will Rowe

Soprano, Cello, and Piano

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 a series of puns on the title, and thus less a narrative of Finch ideas, but more a series of images inspired by the colorful diction he used.

5 Views Re/Dux was originally written for the Fontainebleau Ecole d’Art Americaines in 2016 for soprano, cello and piano, but has since been orchestrated for soprano and chamber orchestra. In the 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.