PRORGAM NOTES

During the pandemic, a team of Canadian conductors and composers wondered how to gather the choral community together through creation. Sonic Timelapse offered a space for conductors and choristers to reflect on how COVID-19 affected them as musicians, and a space for composers to take those reflections and create new works in reaction to those reflections.

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As a composer, it’s impossible to read through all the submitted reflections without attaching one’s personal perspective to them. We are all in this together, after all. And that is what struck me the hardest as I read through them: despite the frustrations and anxieties towards being alone and being silenced or voiceless as musicians, we have come to realise that we are still learning, growing, and sharing together in our communities, with so much purpose and meaning. And that, I find, is something quite positive.

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You can imagine how I was over the moon to find Linda Studley’s poem “Common Silence”. I’ve been setting Linda’s poetry to music for a couple of years now. Seeing she writes about daily struggles and joys, and seeing her body of work is quite extensive, it should not have been a surprise for me to find a text about what can be found in shared silence.

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I hope that through the silence you experience that you, too, will find that we are all in this together, in a strange way, and that you can draw strength from that.
— www.sonictimelapse.com

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