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      ABOUT

Upon retirement, Carol Wood and her husband, the poet John Wood, moved to Saxtons River, Vermont, from Louisiana, where she had been a professor of Medieval Literature at McNeese University.  She first began composing in Louisiana while studying the harp, and she has published over a dozen collections of works for solo harp or harp and voice or other instruments, including The Beasts of Bethlehem, a setting of poems by X. J. Kennedy, and Songs for Married Lovers, which includes settings of works by writers such as John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Dorothy Sayers.

 

More recently, Wood has composed works for unaccompanied male voices (“My First Love Was a Plover”), for children’s voices (“What They Thought about the Moon”), and for SATB chorus and organ (“Endless Forms Most Beautiful,” a setting of Darwin’s stirring conclusion to The Origin of Species).

 

In 2015 her work for chorus, violin, flute, cello, and harp, The Saxtons River Suite, was premiered by Vermont’s Counterpoint Chorus and members of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. The suite’s five movements were based on works by Vermont poets on the five seasons (including Mud Season).  

 

In October of 2022, the ensemble Arioso (made up of Alison Cerutti, piano, Elizabeth Reid, viola, and Linda Radtke, alto) premiered a work written for them by Wood, “Six Curses and a Charm,” settings of Latin curses, medieval book curses, and one Anglo-Saxon magical incantation.

 

During the Christmas season of 2023, Counterpoint Chorus and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra Brass Quintet toured with the premier of Wood’s “The Christmas Truce,” a work celebrating the spontaneous outbreak of peace among the soldiers in the trenches during World War I.

 

Other Vermont ensembles that have performed Wood’s works include The Green Mountain Chorus, the Children’s Choir of Main Street Arts, and the Thetford Singers.

From Reviewers:

British music scholar and critic Nigel Simeone writes of Wood's "telling effect" and "charming ingenuity" in her duet for alto, tenor, and harp (or piano)--a setting of a sonnet in Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night.

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Reviewing the premier of The Saxtons River Suite, Jim Lowe, music critic for the Rutland Herald, says, "It was creative. impressive, and beautiful. . . .warm, lyrical, and expressive."  Lowe also commented on Wood's three art songs performed on the same program:  "daring," delicate," "beautifully crafted by Wood and deeply moving."

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