CD

W.B. Yeats' famous cycle of "Crazy Jane" poems

Settings by Fletcher Collins,
CD production and direction by Debbie Hunter
Cast includes Custer LaRue, soprano, famed soloist with the Baltimore
Consort and former student of Fletcher Collins

"Deeply searching the Yeats' intention lighted by Collins' music."

To our knowledge, no other composer has ventured to set this major work.
Yeats' advisory, "Perhaps," interpreted as challenging, the words settable,
the music compatible, and the title distinguishing this batch of poems from
individuals.

William Butler Yeats, from the liner notes

"...a Cannes doctor told me to stop writing. Then
in the spring of 1929 life returned as an
impression of the uncontrollable energy and
daring of the great creators... I wrote 'Mad as
the Mist and Snow,' a mechanical little song, and
after that almost all of that group of poems
called in memory of those exultant weeks
'Words for Music Perhaps.' Since I have added a
few poems to it,...but always keeping the mood
and plan of the first poems."

About Fletcher Collins

(b.1906), Yale PH.D., has long been known as a musicologist
and activist in the song tradition. He has published and
recently recorded Troubadours A-Courtin', and two volumes of
medieval troubadour/trouvere songs. His doctoral thesis was
in Chaucer's Understanding of Music, and a recent publication,
Shakespeare's Repertory of Songs, is a practical collection of
period songs with contexts for actors and directors. He is a
recognized authority on medieval music drama (The
Production of Medieval Church Music Drama and Medieval
Church Music Drama: A Repertory of Complete Plays.