love games from Love games and illusions

a three-movement cycle for upper voice chorus (SSAA), with optional 2 antiphonal tambourines, and optional harpsichord (2014), 6’

Texts by Mary Wroth

Mary Wroth was a late 16th and early 17th century British writer who is all too little known today despite being the very first woman in the English speaking world to have her sonnets published as well being the author of a scandalous roman à clef which was the Jacobean era equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey. So when Francisco J. Núñez asked me to write a piece for his extraordinary Young People's Chorus of New York City using a public domain text, it seemed a great opportunity to shine some overdue contemporary light on this slightly younger contemporary of Shakepeare, whose plays and poems the members of the chorus would have been assigned to read at some point. (Pace, I did not set any of Wroth's roman à clef...) I would up setting three of Wroth's short lyric poems, two of them sonnets, and those are the three that YPC premiered as Love Games in 2014 as part of their Radio Radiance series.