A slowly evolving project with Joe Butler and singer Sarah Verney Caird,
looking among other things at Troubadour poetry and songs.
It has taken different shapes:
It started off in 2005 with a solo voice song on a poem by Joe.
WHEN SPRING SPRINGS SWEETLY
- In 2012, I wrote a song based on a troubadour poem translated into English by Joe Butler .
Here is a recording of its first performance at a house concert in December 2012, performed by Sarah Verney Caird (voice) and Kesia Decote (piano)
WHEN SPRING SPRINGS SWEETLY
When Spring springs sweetly (text)
ON GARWAY HILL
- In 2009 I asked Joe if he’d write a poem for a three-voices piece (one live and two pre-recorded in a performance situation). The text he produced prompted an attempt at writing a piece using some early Renaissance techniques, a homage rather than a pastiche. Sarah sang the three parts.
This recording is from a rehearsal at Grove House Oxford.
Also below, Joe Butler’s original poem
and views of Garway Hill and the church of St Michael’s Garway (Herefordshire) which I took in July 2015
ON GARWAY HILL
On Garway Hill
On Garway Hill the clouds mass on the hill’s brow
On Garway Hill the Oak stoops to drink from the pool
On Garway Hill the Hare leaps in the ears of wheat
History makes manifest the sublime
and the Child in Time reclines
in spindrift cloud
on Garway Hill
Mystery made manifest – the shrine
the knights brought from the east
and bedded in the bank
of Garway Hill
Synergy and symmetry define
The magical, the line
Scored in the turf
On Garway Hill
And the May blooms, and the lambs bleat, beneath the sickle moon that bellies brighter in the sky on Garway Hill
Bruno Guastalla 