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The “reimagined secular requiem” – Comfort and loss inspired by nature – that was the requirement for this composition.

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Choral music generally needs a text. That implies a lot of research, or at least thinking, before you can start working on the music. The text is most often the starting point. 

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I compose for various kinds of ensembles, but composing songs or choral music is special.  The chosen poem or text makes me write music I would never have done without that specific text.

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

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

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For me, the two poems talks about the same thing, but in very different ways.  I had been so inspired by Dunbar’s poem… but the reference to nature I had found in Boye – so I decided to use them both.

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Boye and Dunbar both had very short lives, both dying young.  Putting together, their lives would have covered a normal life span. Dunbar died only a few years after Boye was born, when she was about 5-6 years old. 

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Their combined life span was 1872-1941.  Different lives, in different parts of the world, in different cultures, of different gender and colour, unaware of each other’s existence. Yet they wrote poems on the same subject, about suffering, life, death, and the search for comfort.

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We are not so different from each other, after all.

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

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