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Katerina Gimon
Katerina Gimon
Bell Tower (SATB)
An invitation to sit with our grief as a gateway to loving and living fearlessly.
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Bell Tower
SATB with piano
Bell Tower is a potent reminder of the meaning of pain and uncertainty in our world — and a call to action for us not to run from it, but to live with it, so it may serve as a gateway to loving and living fearlessly. Depicting this journey of healing, the music unfolds gradually from a gentle and almost eerily quiet opening to an impassioned and roaring finale. This piece is a fitting addition for programs on themes of remembrance, overcoming grief, healing, and finding hope.
This work is a setting of a breathtaking translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29. Bell Tower was commissioned by Chor Leoni, Erick Lichte, Artistic Director, and premiered on November 10, 2021, at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Bell Tower is the winner of the 2023 Chor Leoni C/4: Canadian Choral Composition Competition and a recipient of a Barbara Pentland Award for Outstanding Composition from the Canadian Music Centre (2022).
Composer’s Notes
I came across the text for Bell Tower in March 2020, just as COVID-19 rapidly changed our world. I found myself returning to the poem day after day for weeks as I began to process my own grief and I knew I couldn’t ignore this creative pull. One thing I found particularly striking and timely about this text was how Rilke calls us not to run from the discomfort of our pain, but to live with it, because it doesn’t stay static. Rather, if we let it, our pain will turn to reveal the other side of the coin, which is our love for the world — a powerful and enduring message.
In my musical setting I aimed to depict the journey of healing described in this text. As you listen to Bell Tower, you’ll hear the music gradually unfold from a gentle and almost eerily quiet opening to a powerful, impassioned, and roaring finale!
-Katerina Gimon
Text
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29)
Translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows (used by permission)
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