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The “reimagined secular requiem” -Comfort and loss inspired by nature, was the requirement asked for, in this work.

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Choral music mostly needs a text. That brings a lot of research or at least thinking, before you can start working on the music. Mostly it’s with the text it starts. 

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I compose for different kinds of ensembles, but composing songs or choral music is special.  The chosen poem or text makes me write music I’d never do without that precise text.

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So I searched for texts, and by accident the poem “Forever” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar came up. I didn’t know anything about him. I know NOW that he is quiet known in the US.  

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I liked that little, short poem very much. It talked to me!  But he did not search for comfort in nature. My thoughts went to my compatriot poet, Karin Boye, and her (in Sweden) very known poem, “Yes, it surely hurts when buds are bursting” (Ja visst gör det ont när knoppar brister).

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For me, her poem talks about the same thing as the poem by Dunbar, but in very different ways.  And I was so inspired by his poem… but the nature I found in Boye. So I decided to use them both.

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Boye and Dunbar both had very short lives. Both died young.  Their lives reached a normal lifespan putting them together. Dunbar died only a few years after Boye was born, she was about 5-6 years old. 

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So they lived 1872-1941.  Different lives, different parts of the world, different cultures, different gender and colore, unaware of each other’s existence. But still they wrote poems about the same thing. About suffering, life, death, and searching for comfort.

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We are not so different from eachother, after all.

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I decided to let them talk to each other  through time and space.

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