WORKS
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Songs and Instrumental Music
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Fern Hill

Fern Hill

A luminous concert song (or staged sequence) setting Dylan Thomas’s iconic poem, where childhood radiance and mortal time collide in one sustained arc.

Premiered: 
Recorded and yet to be released or premiered

Works Performed at

FORMAT

Art song / chamber-orchestral vocal setting

WORLD PREMIERE

Recorded and yet to be released or premiered

CREATED, WRITTEN, AND DIRECTED BY

Georgia Shreve, music; Dylan Thomas, words

RUNTIME

Approx. 6–9 minutes

Shreve’s “Fern Hill” translates Dylan Thomas’s pastoral incantation into musical architecture: wonder, velocity, and elegy unfolding in one breath. The setting tracks the poem’s tonal evolution from ecstatic youth into time-conscious reckoning, preserving Thomas’s verbal shimmer while giving singers and ensemble a precise emotional map. In performance, it can stand alone as a concert work or function as a pivotal dramatic node inside a larger theatrical frame.

In Georgia’s Words

“I was drawn to ‘Fern Hill‘ because it holds two truths at once: the intoxication of being young and the inevitability of time. I wanted the music to feel like memory itself, bright, lyrical, then suddenly shadowed, while honoring the poem’s language and pulse.”

About the Work

“Fern Hill” is not treated as a decorative poem-setting, but as a through-composed dramatic curve. Shreve leans into the text’s shifting energies, from the buoyancy of early lines to the late gravity of “green and dying,” shaping the music so that language drives form rather than merely riding on top of accompaniment. The result is a piece that asks for both textual clarity and emotional stamina from performers.

What makes this setting compelling is its handling of momentum. Thomas’s syntax often surges in long, image-rich lines; Shreve mirrors that propulsion musically, then strategically suspends it at points of existential turn. That push-pull gives the work its internal weather: sunlight, breathless motion, recognition, and restraint.

The harmonic and textural world supports this arc without over-illustrating it. Instead of literal pastoralism, the writing favors atmosphere and emotional contour, allowing the performer to inhabit the poem as lived experience rather than recitation. When performed by a compelling singing-actor, Fern Hill can function as memory-space, a threshold scene where personal history and archetypal time overlap.

Selections From The Work

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Songs and Instrumental Music

by Georgia

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Songs and Instrumental Music
Margaret
A Carnegie Hall-premiered (2010) and recorded (2010) tenor-and-piano setting of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” "Margaret" transforms a child’s grief over autumn leaves into a spare, piercing meditation on mortality, memory, and the first knowledge of loss.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Fantasia on Celtic Themes
Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2015, "Fantasia on Celtic Themes" reworks traditional Celtic songs for soprano, tenor, and baritone, turning folk material into a cohesive dramatic journey of longing, love, and ritual memory.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Easter 1916
In "Easter 1916," Georgia Shreve sets W.B. Yeats for soprano, tenor, baritone, and chamber orchestra, transforming a canonical political poem into a layered vocal drama of witness, grief, and historical change. Premiered at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (May 2017), the work’s recurring refrain, “A terrible beauty is born,” evolves from observation into moral reckoning with each return.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
The Lives of a Woman
A full-length musical portrait of female life across generations, "The Lives of a Woman" combines ensemble-driven structure, character doubling, and recurring musical motifs to create a cyclical, emotionally layered journey from childhood wonder to mortality and memory.
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Explore more works by Georgia

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Short Stories
The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
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Plays
The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
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Short Stories
The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
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Poetry
Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
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Poetry
No Pity for Pigeons
In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
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Poetry
You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
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Poetry
New Life
In “New Life,” Shreve imagines reinvention as metalwork: each day newly minted, each love a chance to re-stamp the self. Through images of repaired bridges, open doors, and an untouched bed, the poem captures the vulnerable mechanics of beginning again without denying what came before.
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Poetry
Is There a Poem in the House?
In “Is There a Poem in the House?”, Shreve turns inspiration into a haunting presence that seeps through walls, books, and breath before vanishing again. By merging domestic imagery with artistic dread, the poem captures the fragile cycle of creative arrival and loss with wit, unease, and precision.
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