Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Josephine Stephenson
Into the Wreck (2021)
- Alphonse Leduc (World)
Commissioned by Tenebrae
First performed by Tenebrae with Juliet Stevenson conducted by Nigel Short at St. Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington on 17 September 2021, as part of the Lammermuir Festival.
- SATB
- SATB
- 20 min
- Adrienne Rich, Sappho, Anne Bradstreet, Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Charlotte Smith, Sagawa Chika, Alfonsina Storni, Margaret Fuller, Edit Södergran, Else Lasker-Schüler, Christina Rossetti, Anne Wharton, Mary Coleridge, Emily Dickinson and Sarojini Naidu
- English, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish
Programme Note
It is almost fifty years since Adrienne Rich refused to take for herself the National Book Award for Poetry she had just won for her collection "Diving into the Wreck" (1974), instead sharing it with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women “whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world”. With "Into the Wreck" I wanted to revisit Rich’s beautiful title piece and expand on this idea, making space for the voices of female writers from different places and times whose feelings align remarkably with those of Rich’s diver. Nearly half a century later, Rich's poem retains its freshness and urgency, and the need to listen to these unheard voices remains as strong as ever.
Scores
Reviews
Into the Wreck, a work for mixed chorus and narrator. It comprises settings of multiple texts by century-spanning women authors interleaved by spoken verses of Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem Diving into the Wreck, in which diving is a metaphor for an entitlement to equal rights. A wealth of techniques permeates this twenty-minute score, in which Stephenson achieves miracles of literary and musical cohesion. Tenebrae brought its underwater world vividly to life, its ever-changing sonorities leaving a deep impression.