I’ve been writing for guitar in last few months trying to take advantage of Mannes College and its amazing guitar performance program. Of the larger projects started , A guitar quartet or trio, a solo work for guitar and planning a Cycle for Tenor and Guitar. I completed a setting of Bright Star, working for premiere in May of this year.
Bright Star
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
