Premiere performance of How Shall we Sing in a Strange Land
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Date
2012
Authors
Crossin, C.
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Joseph Twist’s How Shall we Sing in a Strange Land was commissioned by Carl Crossin and the National Youth Choir of Australia with financial assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council and given its premiere performance in Brisbane in July 2012. The work juxtaposes the poem ‘A Song of Hope’ by indigenous poet Odgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal with Psalm 137:4. Both texts deal with the challenges of cultural and spiritual adjustment in new and hostile environments.
Compositionally, the work presents a number of challenges to the conductor and singers. These include aleatoric settings of text fragments for both textural and dramatic purposes, as well as the use of both texts separately and together – the indigenous text is in English while the Biblical text is in Latin. The use of aleatory, reasonably common in contemporary Australian choral composition, requires the conductor to make some significant decisions in order to provide a suitably clustered yet transparent and clear aural background for solo material. The work has received repeat performances by the National Youth Choir and, increasingly by a number of other Australian SATB youth choirs since the premiere in 2012.