Scenes from Crow

This large chamber work was inspired by Crow: from the Life and Songs of the Crow by Ted Hughes, an extended poem in the form of an epic tale that embodies all the themes that have dominated his poetry generally. These include primal subjects such as nature, war, the feminine, death, trickster mythology, and the shift from goddess- to god-centred religions.
Hughes attempts to address the failure of the modern, technological world by using the architype of the crow. A crow is an intelligent, widely distributed and omnivorous bird. It is black, solitary, tough and non-musical. It is a carrion-eater, and so is dependent upon death and destruction. All these attributes are presented in Hughes’s Crow, but so too are visions of post-nuclear aftermath, memories of war, and distortions of ‘grand narratives’, which Hughes sees as having shaped the condition of contemporary life.