Paul Osterfield

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

tenor, oboe, horn, cello, and piano (about 15 minutes)

I have known Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917) and several musical settings of the poetry for several decades. Stevens, a Pulitzer prize winning poet, lawyer, and insurance executive, wrote this set of thirteen short poems early in his career, first publishing them in 1917 and then including them in his first book of poetry, Harmonium, in 1923. This poetry was used by many composers, from Allan Blank and Lucas Foss in the mid-twentieth century to more recent settings by Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ezra Donner, Frank Felice, and others. Initially apprehensive of using such widely-set poems, I had decided to find a similar type of set of short poems from the same period to use, but I was unable to find anything else that spoke to me. Just like each of the previously mentioned settings of the poems are quite different from each other musically, my ideas on how to set these poems differed from how each of these composers approached the poetry. My setting of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2019) was composed for and premiered by the Stones River Chamber Players.

Score will be available for purchase shortly. Please email me at paul@paulosterfield.com, and I will let you know when it is available.



		THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD tenor, oboe, horn, cello, and piano (about 15 minutes) I have known Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917) and several musical settings of the poetry for several decades. Stevens, a Pulitzer prize winning poet, lawyer, and insurance executive, wrote this set of thirteen short poems early in his career, first publishing them in 1917 and then including them in his first book of poetry, Harmonium, in 1923. This poetry was used by many composers, from Allan Blank and Lucas Foss in the mid-twentieth century to more recent settings by Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ezra Donner, Frank Felice, and others. Initially apprehensive of using such widely-set poems, I had decided to find a similar type of set of short poems from the same period to use, but I was unable to find anything else that spoke to me. Just like each of the previously mentioned settings of the poems are quite different from each other musically, my ideas on how to set these poems differed from how each of these composers approached the poetry. My setting of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2019) was composed for and premiered by the Stones River Chamber Players. Score will be available for purchase shortly. Please email me at paul@paulosterfield.com, and I will let you know when it is available.