"Walking Catfish" by Joseph Dillon Ford (music) and Henry Stevens (lyrics)
The Three Poems by Henry Stevens were composed in the same order as they appear in the final score during a period beginning in late June 2008 and lasting until 20 August of the same year. Ford intended them as a gift for the poet, whom he had befriended through correspondence on a Unitarian-Universalist mailing list about Buddhism. Stevens had previously commissioned Ford to compose the score for his poetry DVD titled Victory (2005), and thereafter continued to show his support of new art music as a member of the Delian Society's Order of the Cynthian Palm.
"Walking Catfish" retains the ambiguous harmonic idiom of the first song, but here it functions chiefly to communicate the wonder and sheer capriciousness of the natural world. Dotted rhythms describe the "jazzy" walk of the curious amphibious fish of the title whose ambulatory habits make it unique in the animal kingdom. Lisztian arpeggios and chromaticism meanwhile paint the wild elements and powerfully mysterious forces at play in the subtropical Floridan environment.
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