SATB with Piano
5’00”
than i ever knew
This imaginative through-composed setting of a poem by 13th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī is rich in dramatic potential. The composer creates a mysterious and evocative soundworld that is fitting for the realm 'where everything is music' that this ecstatic poem describes.
“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 center of your chest, and let the spirit fly in and out.”