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Lorelei Ensemble
The Dawning Light
Carson Cooman
A seven movement exploration of songs and poems of the Inuit-Yupik (Eskimo) in anonymous English translations; the music strives to allow the text’s images to generate the music in an organic manner.
SSSSAAAA (and subsets)
1. Moon Music
2. Magic Prayer
3. The Great Sighing
4. Magic Song for She Who Wishes to Live
5. Song of Joy
6. One Great Thing
7. Sun Music
Carson Cooman’s “The Dawning Light” is a seven movement exploration of songs and poems of the Inuit-Yupik (Eskimo) in anonymous English translations. The texts are direct and vivid in their straightforward expression. While not quoting or employing any indigenous musical idiom, the music seeks a similar clarity—striving to allow the text’s images to generate the music in an organic manner. Two outer vocalise (wordless) movements frame the five texted movements. The movements can be excerpted or performed in any combination.
Composer’s Notes
The Dawning Light (2015) for eight women’s voices was commissioned by Lorelei Ensemble (Beth Willer, Founder and Artistic Director), who premiered it on May 22–23, 2015.
The work uses as its text traditional songs and poems of the Inuit-Yupik (Eskimo) in anonymous English translations. The texts are direct and vivid in their straightforward expression. While not quoting or employing any indigenous musical idiom, the music seeks a similar clarity—striving to allow the text’s images to generate the music in an organic manner.
Two outer vocalise (wordless) movements frame the five texted movements and also provide brief synopses of the modal areas traversed by the inner movements. The outer movements evoke the moon and sun respectively in their tranquility and festivity. The inner movements then explore the texts’ contrasting affects within the frame of those natural lights.
In general terms, my music in all genres spends relatively little time in darkness. It tends most often to be at some level about a progression towards light; not always from darkness; sometimes just from lesser light to greater light. So there is a sense in which almost every note I put to paper is a small attempt to react to “the light that fills the world.” In this piece, the texts make this resonance quite explicit.
– Carson Cooman
April 2015
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Text
1. Moon Music
2. Magic Prayer
I arise from rest with movements swift
As the beat of a raven’s wings
I arise
To meet the day.
My face is turned from the dark of night
To gaze at the dawn of the day,
Now whitening in the sky.
3. The Great Sighing
I walked on the ice of the sea
Wandering I heard
The song of the sea
And the great sighing
Of new-formed ice
Go then go
Strength of soul
Brings health
To the place of feasting.
4. Magic Song for She Who Wishes to Live
Day arises
From its sleep,
Day wakes up
With the dawning light.
Also you must arise,
Also you must awake
Together with the day which comes.
5 . Song of Joy
Ajaja—aja—jaja
The lands around my dwelling
Are more beautiful
From the day
When it is given me to see
Faces I have never seen before.
All is more beautiful,
All is more beautiful,
And life is thankfulness.
These guests of mine
Make my house grand,
Ajaja—aja—jaja
6. One Great Thing
And I think over again
My small adventures
When with a shore wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And thought I was in danger.
My fears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.
And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing:
To live to see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.
7. Sun Music
– Texts from traditional poems and songs of the Inuit-Yupik
$10.00 per licensed PDF
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