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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| The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain form a golden age of round-singing; even the nineteenth provided some fine examples. These twelve rounds, set to texts by Shakespeare, Skelton, Swift, Dryden, Johnson, Carroll and Synge, are of varying difficulty and may require rehearsal. Keeping as they do to the style of the period, they […] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| SATB | 7' | English | A poignant set of modern-day madrigals is crafted from three exquisite poems by Christina Rossetti that pay homage to the moon. SATB version also available » | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| SATB | – | English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| SATB | 4'00" | English | Saguaro (pronounced sa-Wah-ro) was written in response to the Tucson shootings on January 8, 2011 – now known as the Tucson Tragedy. It is a song of compassion and tenderness. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saguaro (pronounced sa-Wah-ro) was written in response to the Tucson shootings on January 8, 2011 – now known as the Tucson Tragedy. It is a song of compassion and tenderness. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The familiar words, “It came upon a midnight clear”, are set to a lively tune, with piano accompaniment, and a simple refrain is added, with the words “Deo, Deo, Gloria in excelsis Deo” (“Glory to God in the highest”). Written with women’s voices in mind, it could also be tackled by a good children’s choir. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||