Duration: 2-3 minutes
For: SSAA choir
Premiered by the Twin Cities Women’s Choir in 2013
Awarded the Mary Bussman Emerging Female Composer Award in 2013
I wrote this poem when I was a child on a cold and dreary winter’s day waiting for the spring to return. It is influenced by the Quaker idea of the spirit as an “inner light” which, like a flame, may rekindle other’s spirits, and like the sunlight, can bring forth life from darkness. I later remembered this poem when I was living far from home in the Republic of Georgia. The winter was very harsh, and I was separated from my friends and family. As I began composing, the sounds of the local folk music seeped into my harmonies, which can be heard when the music culminates in rich, powerful chords that we might hear as dissonant. These harmonies, often used to resolve a musical phrase in this tradition, sound to me like an unyielding beam of light. I hope they convey the sense of an inner spirit that may sometimes fade or flicker, but never yields.
Score
Text
Where the sun shines not
let it soon be illuminated
by traveling dawn
or meager candle bright:
may it shine.
Light emanates from all
surround us forever and ever…
What dreams may come when winter’s done away?
When the sun shines not
we find that light within us all.