When I was editing the Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs a few years ago, I decided to write and include a short set of Shakespeare settings for upper voices in two parts with optional baritone part – Three Shakespeare Songs. One of these I had already written – Hark, Hark, the Lark – which had been published in a previous collection of upper voice Shakespeare settings (see Piece of the Week 31 for more details). To this I added a new optional baritone part to give it flexibility, and then I set about choosing two more well-known Shakespeare poems to set – Full Fathom Five and You Spotted Snakes (which I will write about another day).
The songs from Shakespeare’s plays have been set to music by many composers in a range of styles and moods – but they are so much part of our poetic heritage and conjure up so many images, that I hope they can cope with yet another setting! Full Fathom Five is from the Tempest, and is written to be spoken or sung by Ariel following a shipwreck. To me the poem, with its internal rhythms and repeating consonants, felt like a kind of mysterious spell or chant – the alliterative opening words, pointing to the ocean’s depths, and later the ‘sea change, into something rich and strange’ – who could not fail to be moved and inspired by that vision! It seemed to me, too, that there was a kind of inevitability about the poem which suggested a steady, unchanging pace, in which the ideas slowly shifted as if underwater – so, musically, this turned into the two simplest building blocks of music, triads and stepwise motion, blended together, with lots of sustaining pedal in the piano accompaniment. And only in the ‘sea change/rich and strange’ section does the music move away from the white notes, soon returning to a modal A minor as the bell steadily tolls.
My setting of ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ has received many performances, but I’m not aware of any performances of ‘Full Fathom Five’. Perhaps it’s because these settings are somewhat hidden away in a large volume which was published in 2019, just before choirs all stopped singing due to the Covid lockdown. So this link will take you to a digitally created scrolling score – not ideal, but better than nothing – and I still live in hope that somebody might perform, and maybe record, the complete set of Three Shakespeare Songs one day!
Three Shakespeare Songs are published in The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs. The image for this post is of an illustration by Heath Robinson, in an unusually sombre mood.