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)

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Premiered in October 2015

in Baltimore, MD

by Sara C. Woodward and Ledah Finck 

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Listen to a recording of this work on a Soundcloud Playlist

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Audio clips performed by members of the Sara C. Woodward and Ledah Finck

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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.