
Botticellian Trees: Four Tree-Songs, after texts by William Carlos Williams (2015)
Soprano and Violin
Text used with permission of New Directions Publishing
Total duration ca. 10'
Four-movement work
I. The Locust Tree in Flower (first version)
II. The Botticellian Trees
III. Winter Trees
IV. The Locust Tree in Flower (second version)
Premiered in October 2015
in Baltimore, MD
by Sara C. Woodward and Ledah Finck
Listen to a recording of this work on a Soundcloud Playlist
Audio clips performed by members of the Sara C. Woodward and Ledah Finck
Purchase this score and parts from
Peter Dayton Music (ASCAP) for: $15.00
I had long struggled to find poems by Williams that I felt could be musically set. Williams’ conversational tone makes his poetry generally better for speaking than singing. These pastoral poems, however, gave me an opening into Williams’s world. Not technically a four seasons piece, the text’s (and music’s) transformation between the first and last movements gives the group of songs both a cyclic sense, and a forward progression. The piece was composed in the spring of 2015 at the request of Ledah Finck and Natanya Washer.
Texts by William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909-1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.