The Phoenix and the Turtle

This is my second major band work, but the first one I feel comfortable sharing with the world. You can find it on Audio here. It is a grade 5 piece and is approximately 12-13 minutes long and is a great example of my own personal growth as it took nearly a year to complete and then another edition of revisions after the recording linked above was made. That recording is still accurate enough if you are interested in using this work with your band.

This piece is now available in at Heuss! Purchase today in print for the price of $70!

Here is the info about the piece, as printed on the interior cover:

This composition was a passion project for me for a long time, more of a testing of ideas than anything else, and then one day I decided it might be good enough to make it the beautiful piece it is now. It was a test to see how well I could adapt literature to music. It is something I hope to do more of in the future. Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is an excellent first piece of literature to try this with, as it deals with the full extent of human emotion and deals with themes of love and death.

The original poem is about two birds, a phoenix and a turtle dove, who fall in love, but that love is shunned by all of the other birds except the eagle. Our two birds reflect and are deeply saddened by all that will be lost so they might be together. They then flee their former lives and the birds that don't wish them together before finding a place of their own, and eventually with time, the two come to terms with their existence and simply exist to love one another and cherish the time they have. This love bringing them so close together that one hardly exists outside of the other. Yet the years together are not enough, as though the phoenix is immortal, the turtle dove can only live so long. So this poem closes, with the phoenix alone again.

Part of my research on this piece showed that in Arabic, the word for phoenix was the same as that for a palm tree, so Shakespeare drew upon that correlation at times in his writing. The first theme you hear will be repeated at other times throughout, seemingly random at times, and is a reference to the dual nature of the word.

As it is based off of the Shakespeare work with the same name, there is a guide in the conductor's score for what parts of the score line up with the text.