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About the Composer
Paul John Rudoi
Graphite Publishing
Two Old Crows (TBB)
Onomatopoeia, stage movement, fun. A silly exploration of sound.
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Two Old Crows
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Two Old Crows
TBB, violin, piano
This humorous poem is deftly set by Rudoi, embracing the onomatopoeia in the text and echoing it in the voices and violin. Rudoi bounces back and forth between independent vocal lines, voice pairs and homophony, and alternates between sung and spoken notes. The result is a delightful piece with manageable voice leading, exciting rhythms and even some subtle movement suggestions.
Composer’s Notes
Following the success of “If I Were a Dog,” I wanted to write another animal work, this time focused on something entirely silly. I remembered Norman Dello Joio’s wonderful but difficult work “Of Crows and Clusters” and how the text was so fun (and funny). Finding Vachel Lindsay’s poem again was a perfect impetus to write a more accessible setting of this text.
Imagine a child has asked you for a funny bedtime story, except the child is the audience: You are storytellers of a goofy story here, so you cannot go too far with this piece in both the emotional delivery and the physical suggestions throughout the score. Come in and out of the story to give them a wink, or decide on two very
different voices for each of the crows, or get visually scared when an actual bee flies close to their rail. In essence, HAVE WAY TOO MUCH FUN. The audience will be in the palm of your hand if you do.
– Paul John Rudoi, 2020
Text
Two old crows sat on a fence rail.
Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Thinking of effect and cause,
Of weeds and flowers,
And nature’s laws.
One of them muttered, one of them stuttered,
One of them stuttered, one of them muttered.
Each of them thought far more than he uttered.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle:
The muttering crow
Asked the stuttering crow,
“Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?
Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?”
“Bee-cause,” said the other crow,
“Bee-cause,
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.”
Just then a bee flew close to their rail: —
“Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
ZZZZZZZZ.”
And those two black crows
Turned pale,
And away those crows did sail.
Why?
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.
“Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.”
– “Two Old Crows” by Vachel Lindsay, from The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems. © New York: Macmillan,
1917.
$2.15 per licensed PDF
Music from Graphite Publishing
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Let My Voice Be Heard (SSA)
Difficulty: 2Duration: less than 3 min. -
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Serenade
Difficulty: 3Duration: less than 3 min. -
