Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

I love this poem. Though there are myriad complex readings of it, for me, it is at its heart that in the sheer wonder of the stars at night Hopkins finds, as one and the same thing, both the earthly and the heavenly. We are in the earthly here, and we can be transported to the heavenly there. Though I do not share Hopkins' Catholic religiosity and so his view on how that might be achieved, certainly I sense the possibility of a kind of transcendent spirituality. For me, that transcendence has as its foundation our simply celebrating the glorious universe in which we live. We are blessed.

Any composer will tell you that in setting Hopkins' words there are profound challenges. While his evocative choice of words and word combinations and assonances can awaken certain harmonic colours, his unique prosody is quite something else. His focus on the natural flow of the spoken language - its rhythms and variability of pacing, its intonations and gestures - is difficult to capture if one chooses, as I did, to respect it. I plucked up the courage to try; I hope that I have not done him a disservice.

I thank Hopkins for the gift of this poem. Full of such love, such joy, such devotion.

Work Details

Year: 2017

Instrumentation: SATB Choir, with divisi.

Duration: 4 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

First performance: 20 Nov 22. St Ignatius of Antioch, Manhattan, NY, USA

Prizes/Awards: Prizewinner in the Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble Emerging Composers Competition, 2019-2020