Composition

Songs to the Fair Youth: 6 Songs on Fluidity is part of the composer’s ongoing project to set the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare into song cycles. Each cycle in the project shares a common lexicon of leitmotifs, and every cycle based on the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets features an obbligato instrument. This particular cycle highlights the alto saxophone.

This work brings together six of Shakespeare’s sonnets that most vividly reveal the poet’s fluid approach to desire, interrogating the perceived binaries of love, sex, and gender. The cycle opens with the hymn-like reverence of Sonnet 108, which declares timeless love to the Fair Youth, only to be sharply contrasted by the operatic defiance of Sonnet 121. Here, the speaker boldly confronts public judgment and asserts the right to live and love freely. Following a Schumann-esque Romance, the love-triangle sequence lies at the heart of the cycle, where the boundaries between sexuality, desire, friendship, and rivalry blur, as the poet, the Fair Youth, and the Dark Lady become tangled in a complex web of affection and betrayal. Ambiguity shifts to gender in Metamorphosis, which traces a journey of self-identification and transformation. As the saxophone line cycles through many incarnations of the same motif, it gradually gains confidence through a process of perplexity and pain—a transformation that resonates deeply with the queer experience. Sonnet 20 brings the cycle to a close with a tender exploration of gender fluidity and attraction, with its inherent ambiguity mirrored in the aleatoric elements of the music.