Ross Edwards: The Hermit of Green Light (1979) - The Hermit of Green Light

Abstract

"The suggestion that I should set to music some of Michael Dransfield' s poetry came from the countertenor Hartley Newnham who,jointly with the pianist Nicholas Routley, commissioned me to write these songs in 1979. Dransfield, who died in 1973 at the age of twenty-four, was the author of more than 600 poems. My response to his work was immediate and I chose four poems which form a miniature cycle linked by a common theme: the relationship of human beings to the natural environment. I was attracted to the first poem, which is set in a recitative-like style, through a somewhat wistful identification of myself with the hermit in his solitude; and to the second and third- both taken from Dransfield' s Geography cycle - by their ecstatic, visionary qualities. The final poem, profoundly calm yet poised on the brink of despair, seemed to require hardly any comment from the piano and is thus largely unaccompanied." -- Ross Edwards