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Please specify the version of “Sonnet XVIII” that you are purchasing, by voice type: soprano/tenor or mezzo soprano
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Program Notes
Sonnet XVIII was composed with the intention of being performed at our outdoor wedding
in June 2016. The setting was a mill in a valley by a creek - a beautiful scene, and not perfectly quiet. My vision was that the music would waft on the breeze, sometimes almost getting lost in the sound of the water. As it turned out, the singer got bronchitis and we had to do some last-minute shuffling.
The piece was premiered a year later at the WindDown Festival (a kind of afterparty during the Toronto Fringe Festival) at Majlis Art Garden in Toronto - also an outdoor space, but a more urban one.
The soprano was Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, my long-time collaborator.
If you would like to perform this song outdoors, you should! If you would like to perform it in a concert hall, that works too... but perhaps you could consider singing it from the balcony, or offstage, or while processingly slowly down the aisle.
Sonnet XVIII
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet XVIII appeared on Alex Eddington’s 2021 album A Present From a Small Distant World. (Note: the electronics at the beginning are a feature of the album and not required for performance!)
Here’s the track on Bandcamp:
