Dove, Jonathan - It sounded as if the Streets.....

The composer says of setting Emily Dickinson's poetry:

"One reason I am repeatedly drawn to set the poems of Emily Dickinson to music is that hardly any of them were known, let alone spoken aloud or sung, during her lifetime.

When she died, in 1886, an enormous number of poems were discovered (there are 1,775 in total). Some of them were published over the next ten years; many more were hidden away again for another thirty years.

The thought of these powerful words being unseen and unheard for so long makes me want to hear them sung as often as possible!

Dickinson's work also invites singing because her language is so simple and economical, and yet contains wonders: seeing the world through her eyes, we watch the unfolding of vast, cosmic dramas."