for flute, fixed media, and laptop
House on the Hill is a poem by Edwin Robinson. The poem House on the Hill is in the form of a villanelle. Villanelles use a complicated pattern of repeating phrases that pick up new meanings each time you hear them. The second half of this work uses both the text of House on the Hill (read by the commissioner of the work Catherine Ramirez) and the music is also in villanelle form.
The House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill.
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
-Edwin Arlington Robinson
Justin Merritt 