Turn It Up: The Music of Wallace Stevens

At the Huffington Post, composer Mohammed Fairouz discusses his recent song cycle, Domination of Darkness, based on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. How does Fairouz amplify the inherent music of Steven's verses? Fairouz explains:

My fifteenth song cycle, Domination of Darkness, is also one of my strangest works. For this piece I chose to revisit an old poetic friend, Wallace Stevens, and set five of his early poems to music. I thought that I knew these poems very well and in a certain way I did. I've known them, as the beautiful expression has it, by heart for a long time. But returning to them with the intention of setting them to music was different and, much to my joy, a great experience of learning and growth.

In his early volume, Harmonium, Wallace Stevens came out as an irresistibly fresh and sensual poetic voice. I've always been attracted to the vigorous, refreshing quality of the poems since I was a child and when I received a commission to write for countertenor and flute, I thought that the instrumentation (a vivid treble sound-world) would be a perfect playground for Stevens' fresh evocations of the great outdoors. After all, this soundscape was to combine two of the world's oldest instruments: the human voice and the flute. But when I sat down to set these poems to music, I found a fascinating tension between the old and the new, between the reverential and the sleazy and between the great outdoors and the great "indoors" of self-examination and introspection.

That's certainly music to our ears! Head over to HuffPo to read about Fairouz's treatment of the five Stevens poems in the song cycle.