For High Voice and Piano
Duration: 6 minutes
This piece was written for a specific singer, Madeline Herdeman. After hearing her sing, the timbre of her voice inspired me to set the text Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth. I could imagine her singing the song as her voice drifts through the countryside. This was my first attempt at setting text. So I broke the piece up into the separate stanzas of the poem, although I tried to maintain a thread tying all the sections together as it is intended as a single piece and not several movements.
The painting to the left is “Song of the Lark” by Jules Breton. I saw this painting in an art museum not long after finishing the piece. The painting grasps with color and visual representation, what I wanted to depict with the music.
