The Cry of the Sedge

A Ritual Drama for soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor, baritone, and guitar

1973

35 minutes

Poetry by William Butler Yeats

Premiere: University of Illinois
April 17, 1974
Frances Crawford, soprano; Mary Burdette, mezzo soprano, Thomas Mitchell, tenor; Ronald Hedlund, baritone; Paul Cox, guitar.

Withdrawn, replaced by Ancient Roses for mezzo-soprano and harp.

Composer Notes:
The premiere The Cry of the Sedge was semi-staged—ritualistically telling a story rather than enacting a story. Yeats had an anti-theatrical attitude toward the stage, feeling that actors and acting stole attention from his poetic language:

Marionettes, for Yeats as for most theater reformers at the turn of the century, were the only Western model for a fully depersonalized mode of acting, one that successfully rid the stage of the awkward presence of live human beings.—Martin Puchner¹

I’ve grown to embrace an overtly theatrical approach to the stage and find the contributions of performers essential to the performance experience. Eventually my attitude toward the theater became so diametrically opposite from Yeats’s that I withdrew this work.

Nonetheless, I still loved much of Yeats’s poetry that I had set in this work. In 2015, thanks to a suggestion from mezzo soprano Kristin Dauphinais, I composed a concert piece, Ancient Roses, for mezzo soprano and harp. This new work uses fewer poems than I worked with while composing Cry of the Sedge. And while composing Ancient Roses I imagined the work in the tradition of ballad singing, and not as a partially staged work.