Composing a new Shakespeare song!

For today’s #WeeklyWednesday, I decided to show you a new song I’m working on composing and recording! I hope you enjoy hearing it and a bit about the process of writing music for Shakespeare’s plays, which I really enjoy doing!

I play it twice, at 1:03 and 7:12.

This is my fourth or fifth version of “Come Away, Death” from Twelfth Night. You can hear bits of two others below – one of them is kind of a fugue-ish embellishment on this melody:

The goal for this new version is to come up with a simple melody that would be singable for most people; the other two versions I’ve written that are similar in style and sound will act as embellishments on that theme (even though they preceded it ;)).

In today’s video, I also ended up talking a bit about the First Folio and I really hope I remembered things correctly! If you need a good Shakespeare resource, the Folger Shakespeare Library is amazing…

I hope you enjoy this, and thank you, as always, for watching ?

If you’d like more of my Shakespeare videos, check out this playlist!

#AshleyWagnerArts