Birches was composed as a response to the poem of the same title by the great American poet, Robert Frost. My intent was not to “set” the poem, but rather to explore its inner workings — to re-imagine its parentheticals, present in Frost’s vicarious vision of a boy, a scene of birches, and the truth of the matter versus the ‘truth’ as revealed in the confession of an old man looking back.
Birches is dedicated to my father and was composed for violist John Graham.
Listen to Birches:
Birches for viola and electronic sounds
A score is also available here, scanned from the original hand manuscript. It is licensed under a “Creative Commons” license, see below.
Birches for viola and electronic sounds by Kevin Ernste is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.