Moira Smiley's Time In Our Voices recorded live at Koncertkirken in Copenhagen in 2018. Ars Nova Copenhagen conducted by Paul Hillier.

Mvt1 00:00; Mvt2 02:42; Mvt3 05:24; Mvt4 08:08; Mvt5 10:18

COMPOSER’S NOTES:
This piece grew from two sound roots. The first was knowing that it would be sung in the June, 2017 concert honoring Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” – with concert themes of time, light and eternity. The second was imagining 900 high school singers sing this piece while experiencing the grandeur and wonder of their voices in the vaulted Walt Disney Concert Hall during the LAMCHSCF. I decided to ask these young singers to get very personally involved in the event by making their own 30 second mobile phone recordings of friends and family talking about ‘time’. I’ve built playback of those recordings into the performance of the piece – bringing the mobile phone temporarily out of concert-hall-taboo, and into artistic play in the sacred space of the choral concert. I also hope it’s an engaging way to bring dear ones into a conversation about the changing sound of a voice across a lifetime.

TEXT
Time, what is the hum of this life known through our voices - the sounds
made by our breath, flesh and bone?

The lungs of babes call out ‘Here I am now!’
Cooing, wailing to measure this new time and space.
And soon a child gives voice to questions we forgot the asking of.
So bright their sound of play – a ringing bell of the new day.

We deepen, falter, fly, and stretch again our flesh and bone to carry
self and sound - impatient now - to sing a song that is our own.
Head-long cross the threshold run into our time of ‘I Am Grown’.

Into our bounded fields of time, whose edges we glance now and then,
we curious (furious) and joyous throw the seeds of us into the meadow.
Humming to the hum of all things. More and more, yet more we bring.

When the wheel slows, intervals widen, stillness holds...
Reflections are as real as the now they mirror to us.
Cut to bone by loss, our tenderness is found.
We’re broken and put back together, touched by sound.

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