The Colour of His Hair
This work received second place in the 2015 Ithaca College Choral Composition Competition. It sets a poem by A. E. Housman which was not published until after his death. In 1895 Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years for being a practicing homosexual, a crime in England at that time. Housman’s poem, while seemingly tongue-in-cheek, was written in protest of Wilde’s incarceration and a British court system so arbitary in its justice that a man could conceivably be imprisoned because of “the colour of his hair.”
| Instrumentation: | A Cappella |
| Difficulty: | Advanced Student, Advanced |
| Descriptive Tags: | Humorous |
| Language: | English |
| Sacred or Secular: | Secular |
| Voicing: | SATB, SATBB |
| Duration: | 1-5 Minutes |
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