Composed by Kim Farris-Manning, 2024-2025 (Victoria BC) for SATB choir + piano Collaborator: Alex Dawson, poet and photographer (above) A new piece for Vox Humana on text by Alex Dawson. Premiering May 17 2025 at “of the Earth”, VH’s spring concert in Victoria BC.
The natural world - its grandeur, beauty, and permanence - has been an inspiration for poets and musicians for centuries, but there is a new and different imperative to singing and writing about the earth as we watch the worldwide disruption of natural systems that seemed immutable. Our world is beautiful, yet fragile, and we are not just closely linked with it, but are truly of the earth - clay into which life has been breathed; the earth is our soul. This is a concert of music exploring our relationship with the earth, but despite all, ultimately optimistic in outlook: if we renew the earth, we renew ourselves, and our relationships with one another. Featured on this concert will be a new commission by Kim Farris-Manning, as well as Eric Esenvalds, Andrew Balfour, Marie Alice Conrad, Charles Stanford, and Laura Hawley.
Original poem:
Starbirds A fumble of feather into the charcoal treeline. The starlings play. “Just another blackbird,” you mutter. “Just another blackbird,” but don’t you see their smattering of silver? That subtle constellation spread across their feathers? Celestial secrets visible, only in certain light and perhaps only to people who tend to look for things like that. I tend to look for things like that. Mining the mundane for magic can be exhausting work, and somewhat pointless in a practical world, but I can’t help myself.
And this time –
I wonder, if, one day, long, long ago, the starlings up and left their avian galaxy and, in the biggest celestial event the planet ever saw, dropped straight down to Earth. A million feathered falling stars, they caught themselves, one second before impactremembering after all, that they could fly.