On Love: Triptych based on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (For two actors, soprano, and ensemble)

On Love is built as two pieces superimposed. One, performed by the instruments and soprano, is a re-imagination of William Byrd's masses even when the only direct quotation is of Heart's Ease, the anonymous song that mentioned in Act 4 of Shakespeare's play. The second piece is the one performed by the actors. Their script is designed as a "ping-pong" game built on on every sentence in Romeo and Juliet that features the word "love" plus fragments of two soliloquies: Juliet's in the balcony (act 2, scene 2) and Romeo's at the grave (act 5, scene 3). Then, music and text behave, for the most part, as independent streams. Their relationship is, if anything, practical: both were developed using the same kinds of techniques, those that have been at the core of my work over the last few years.