Sonnet XVIII ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day")

Sonnet XVIII was composed with the intention of being performed at our outdoor wedding in June 2016. The setting was a mill in a valley by a creek - a beautiful scene, and not perfectly quiet. My vision was that the music would waft on the breeze, sometimes almost getting lost in the sound of the water. As it turned out, the singer got bronchitis and we had to do some last-minute shuffling. The piece was premiered a year later at the WindDown Festival (a kind of afterparty during the Toronto Fringe Festival) at Majlis Art Garden in Toronto - also an outdoor space, but a more urban one. The soprano was Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, my long-time collaborator.

If you would like to perform this song outdoors, you should! If you would like to perform it in a concert hall, that works too... but perhaps you could consider singing it from the balcony, or offstage, or while processingly slowly down the aisle.

From the album "A Present From a Small Distant World" (Redshift Records, February 19 2021)

• Vocals: Kristin Mueller-Heaslip

• Recorded by: Paul Talbott at Union Sound Company

• Editing and Mixing: Paul Talbott

• Mastering: Sage Kim at Lacquer Channel

"Toronto composer Alex Eddington's unorthodox debut album A Present from a Small Distant World is many different things all at once. Sometimes dark, sometimes downright silly, certain moments bear a resemblance to traditional art song, whereas on other occasions Eddington unfurls strange synthetic textures. Its uncharacteristically broad aesthetic reach is matched by its temporal span. Traversing — and often revisiting — music from the past 18 years, it serves as a portrait of his close collaborative relationship with soprano Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, who plays a number of different protagonists throughout the album. While its nearly two-decade coverage accounts for a certain amount of the album's gleeful heterogeneity, this can also be attributed to its underlying inspiration, which is revealed in the opening cut. There a faded-xerox-choir of Mueller-Heaslips intones Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech that launched the Voyager spacecraft and its so-called Golden Record—a phonographic disc containing an encyclopedic dog's breakfast of earthly texts, images, and music—into space. "The chances that an alien civilization will intercept and decode the record are not high," explains Eddington, "but there is something wonderful about sending greetings hurtling outward." ... Scintillator's gibberish text...was excavated from Eddington's spam folder. Mueller-Heaslip imbues it with maximum urgency, her intensity only magnified by searing electronic effects that Eddington integrated for this recording." (Nick Storring)