Response from The William Stafford Estate

Dear Laura,

Thank you very much for sending the sheet music and disk of your setting of "A Ritual to Read to Each Other." I found it memorable and haunting, a very intriguing account of the poem, and very suitable - I thought the insistent percussive accompaniment caught the poem's urgency very effectively, and your singing is excellent - melancholy, plaintive, and a direct rendition of the text with all the seriousness it demands. Thank you for doing this - it will I'm sure be played, along with other settings of Stafford poems, to composition classes here in the future, and I know it will be heard attentively and with appreciation.

All best wishes,

Paul Merchant

back