That the sunrise not leave us unmoved (2026)

Composer Note

Reading the American writer May Sarton’s 1977 journal The House by the Sea, I was struck by the following words, which emerge from a reflection on the horrors of hostility and war: ‘It is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.’ This simple and yet daring and powerful thought led me back to the poems of Emily Dickinson, with their capacity for addressing some of the most profound existential questions in just a few lines, and I started collecting and reassembling fragments that I felt also had to do with that ‘ecstasy’ that Dickinson herself found in living, observing nature and realising that infinity exists in the smallest things. The words remind us that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves, which carries great responsibility as well as great possibility. The music flowed directly from this new text: the charged, weighty words becoming light as they are held by the voices of the chorus and anchored by the sounds of the orchestra, making space for a moment of reflection and communion, experiencing that true joy of playing and listening to music together in numbers, on a summer evening.

© Josephine Stephenson