Where Everything is Music

Scored for: SSA Chorus and piano
Date completed: 2022
Text: Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne. Used with permission.
Duration: 6:33 min.
Premiere: July 25, 2002, Sigma Alpha Iota National Conference in Greensboro, NC, IAMA Choir, Brittany Kaehler, conductor
Commissioned by: Sigma Alpha Iota National Conference
Published by: CF Peters. For scores contact Trudy Chan. For other questions, contact Andrea Clearfield:

See preview score pages:
Where_Everything_is_Music_perusal pages

LISTEN to an excerpt

LISTEN to the work premiered at SAI National Conference, IAMA Choir, Brittany Kaehler, conductor, July 25, 2022

TEXT

WHERE EVERYTHING IS MUSIC

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the centre of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.

From Rumi – Selected Poems
Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

Premiere bow, credit: Gregory Dickens, Sigma Alpha Iota