shadows rising soundless as night
comissioned by the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra (2025)
shadows rising soundless as night is a reflection on a poem by Derek Walcott, titled The Season of Phantasmal Peace. Walcott’s poetry is filled with rich images of dusk at the precipice of darkness, of birds far overhead crying mutely, and of humanity at a distance. The poem’s description of birds abandoning humanity asks a poignant question: how have humans betrayed our Earth? In the face of our anthropogenic climate crisis, how does nature cry out? This orchestral work aims to grapple with the impossible, yet inviting task of translating these poetic ideas into music, speaking as the birds in Walcott’s poem do, in “multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing” the sky. The piece reflects also on Walcott’s identity specific approach to art echoed in the following quote in his own words from his 1992 Nobel Prize Lecture: “Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language.
Seare Ahmad Farhat 