Ron Ford : Seeds of Paradise (2002)
for soprano, violin, recorder, percussion

'Seeds of Paradise' is a set of fragments, stitched together into a single movement. The binding factor is the text, a collection of Japanese haiku, all written by poets shortly before their death. While the poetry is not always 'about' death, it lingers in the background. Also essential to the piece is the fact that the performers are asked to play as soft as possible, but amplified, creating as it were a sound under a microscope. As haikus create a world from just a few words, so in 'Seeds of Paradise' is a small sound opened up to the listener. 'Seeds of Paradise' was written for ELECTRA, with financial support from the Fonds for the Scheppende Toonkunst.

Text Seeds of Paradise :

the autumn flowers of my prayer bear seeds pf paradise
the moon leaks out from sleeves of cloud and scatters shadows
round a flame two tiger moths race to die
it lights up as lightly as it fades - a firefly
my coming, my going, two simple happenings that got entangled
clear sky, the way i came by once, now i go back by
sounds of melody, thus begins my debut in the world beyond

Ron Ford was born in 1959 in Kansas City. He studied composition, piano, and computer science from 1978-1983 at the Duke University in North Carolina. In 1982 and 1983 he was a theory instructor at the Aspen Music Festival, in Colorado. In 1983 he moved to The Netherlands where he finished his piano and composition studies at the Sweelinck Conservatorium and the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. His teachers included Robert Heppener and Louis Andriessen. In 1984, he attended composition classes with Franco Donatoni at the Chigiana Academy in Sienna and in 1987 he received the Encouragement Prize for Composition from the city of Amsterdam for his work 'Song and Dance' for soprano and chamber orchestra. In 1994, he was composition fellow at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts, where he studied with Mario Davidovsky. In 1998 he was awarded the Mathijs Vermeulen Prize for his work 'Salome Fast' for large ensemble, speaking voice and electronics.