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The composer writes: These five song-texts are derived from Shakespeare’s plays. As such, they began their life as poetry for public singing (as opposed to silent reading, which was the intended use of his sonnets). In these settings I’ve made no conscious attempt to imitate or invoke stylistic features of Renaissance music from England: any similarities are purely coincidental. Rather, I chose these texts because I found them evocatively useful for my own musical style. This work is also the product of a self-imposed musical challenge: to write a set of pieces that are effective as songs for soprano voice, but that would also work well as recital pieces for oboe and piano. Because this was my intention from the outset, neither version can be described as an “arrangement” of the other.
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