Two romantic songs
Category
choral
Opus
66
Catalogue no
Novello NOV 
952501
Instrumentation
Mixed choir SSAATTBB
DATE
1994
Duration
10 
mins
Publisher
Novello

on poems by John Keats

Ode to Autumn
To Sleep

programme note

These two songs were written in 1995, when I was living in the Akuapem hills in rural Ghana. For many years I had steered clear of setting well-known poetry, feeling that a good poem is best left alone. In December 1994, however, I was asked to make a setting of Keats' Ode to Autumn, and in a rash moment agreed to do so. When I looked at the poem (which I had not read for years) I was appalled, because it is extremely long, full of purple words and phrases, and is cast in long sentences with tortuous secondary clauses - all of which make it quite unsuitable for setting to music. But I had agreed to do so, and when I started, it became a fascinating task. The commission fell through, of course; but I wrote the setting anyway - partly because of the musical challenge, and partly because I think I was subconsciously hankering to be reconnected with European culture, from which (living in a hilltop African farmhouse surrounded by silk-cotton and mango-trees) I felt very remote. The idea of autumnal mists and mellowness, when one is in a tropical climate which varies little from day to day, is very nostalgic.  To Sleep was added just over a year later, and was written in London. I decided not to impose myself upon Keats, but to let him dominate me; so the style of the music is different from anything I have written - positively lush and romantic. Hence the title.

Giles Swayne 2009

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