Medium
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Alto voice, tenor voice, baroque transverse
flute, baroque tenor recorder, guitar
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When
Dell Hollingsworth, the founder of La Follia Austin Baroque ensemble,
approached me in late 1999 and asked if I would write a new work for La
Follia to include in their "Millenium Concert," I was thrilled with the
idea. I had wanted to write for this ensemble for a long time but
had not as yet had the opportunity. She said I could use everyone
in the ensemble except the keyboard players, who already had their
hands full with the rest of the music on the program. I asked her
to choose a text, and she sent me "rosetree, rosetree" by e.e.
cummings, a strange and enigmatic verse, and one that posed a
considerable challenge in setting it to music. Since I was
writing for La Follia, I also wanted to pay tribute to them somehow in
the music, so I decided to use the famous "Folias de Espaņa"
theme, from which the group takes its name. The piece thus became
"rosetree follies," a setting of the cummings poem in
theme-and-variation form using the La Follia melody as its structural
basis. It is scored for alto and tenor voices, baroque flute,
baroque tenor recorder, and guitar.
What I enjoyed most about writing and rehearsing rosetree was seeing
how the members of La Follia slowly took over the piece and made it
their own. What began as a tentative reading through a brand new
work in an unfamiliar idiom soon became an enthusiastic and confident
performance of a work that was entirely theirs. They did the same
thing with my score that they have done with hundreds of baroque
scores--they brought it to life by experimenting with (and arguing
over) tempos and articulation, by adding baroque-style ornaments to the
melodies, and by using their extremely critical ears to hone it into a
finished work. rosetree follies
belongs as much to La Follia as it does to me.
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