Reverie

Notes

Reverie was written for a Commission I received from the Cambridge Composers’ Network for the Cambridge Music Festival in November 2016. The piece was performed at Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge.

"Reverie" is my setting of the romantic poet Ada Cambridge's "Peace", the beautiful language of which captivated me instantly. For me, the lines, "No sound of strife, of labour or of pain, No ring of woodman's axe, no dip of oar" is almost a foreshadowing of the Industrial Revolution, and the whole poem brings to mind the notion of a time before it. Thus, the text is, in my interpretation at least, a reflection on the impact of humans both on the environment and on themselves. It is with this idea in mind that I wrote this piece, which I chose to entitle "Reverie" because of the almost eutopian image conjured by the poem, which, in the modern world, can often seem so distant.