Echoes of Byzantium, after Yeats (2006)

Inspired by Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium this piece is my attempt to set the meaning of the text to music without actually setting the text. In Echoes of Byzantium, I tried not only to capture the essence of Yeats’s masterpiece, but also to capture the spirit of Byzantine civilization. Throughout there is a Byzantine chant that appears in several forms. At the beginning, the chant is in its most distant, ethereal state but conversely when the speaker actually reaches Byzantium, the chant is clearly apparent and concrete. This work does not attempt to match up the poem word for word with the music, but rather gives the idea of its essence as I perceive it.

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