I Shall Not See the Shadows
Original Instrumentation
SSAATTBB and String Orchestra
Alternate Arrangements
Choral Octavo
Duration
4:00
Text
Christina Rossetti
Premiere and Commission Info
World premiere performance on February 25, 2023 at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA by VOCES8, Friction Quartet and Keisuke Nakagoshi, conducted by Christopher Tin. Commissioned by Agapella (Singapore) in commemoration of its 20th anniversary.
PROGRAM NOTES
"I Shall Not See the Shadows" is based on Christina Rossetti's poem "When I Am Dead My Dearest". It portrays death at its most indifferent--unnoticed, unheralded, unremembered. It also suggests that forgetting is a form of extinction, too--that the finality of species lies not in the death of its last remaining members, but in the failure to preserve their memory.
We are currently in an epoch known as the sixth mass extinction--and estimates show that the current rate of extinction, caused almost wholly by manmade factors, is anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times faster than the normal baseline. And despite the high-profile collapse of many species like the passenger pigeon, the majority of extinctions happen quietly.
AVAILABLE EDITIONS
