Song of the Witches - (2010) 
William Shakespeare
for countertenor and piano
for Leandro Samuel Bermudez Lafont
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
[ 4 pages, circa 2'25" ]
William Shakespeare
The text is drawn from Macbeth, Act IV, scene one, lines 10-19 and 35-38. The longer scene between the three witches begins before this text scene before a caldron in a "cavern," as the stage directions insist. I have seen the play in a number of fine productions, one in which the three witches were played by actors of wildly different heights, physical characteristics and three distinctive voices, high, medium and low. The phantasmal text, as edited above and imagined for a single "witch," suggested a countertenor for this solo song setting.
The gestures are several, distinct and outline a heavily decorated and chromatically colored A minor. Upper and lower neighbors define the modal quality of the setting, as the voice declaims the text with snap rhythms and unusual intervallic leaps.
The score for Song of the Witches is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this piano-vocal score.
