Son to Mother

"In 2017, I was commissioned by the Svanholm Singers to write a work for inclusion in a concert marking 70 years since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Choosing a text was difficult. I came across upon a poem by American poet Maya Angelou, but it struck me as being too powerful and emotional for the music I was writing to carry it; everything I composed sounded banal next to Angelou's words. I soon realized that I could use silence to enhance the text, rather than heaping layers and layers of music upon it. Silence is both terrifying and serious - in a sense, it is the only adequate counterpoint to the poetry.So, I decided to build the piece on silence. Though the beginning of the piece is the opposite of silence - a scream of desperation - I followed that outburst by cutting the poem's stanzas into single words, repeated in a different order each time, almost in the manner of a mantra." - Henrik Dahlberg. Also available for TTBB.