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Shruthi Rajasekar
Shruthi Rajasekar Music
Palm to Palm
Rajasekar’s accessible and tender Palm to Palm imagines the chain of womxnhood across generations who share wisdom, experience, and love through their hands.
SSAA a cappella
In Palm to Palm, poet Anna Leader writes of the “handfuls of love passed from palm to palm” across generations: “Now I hold my mother’s hand in mine / And I will hold my daughter’s hand like she held mine.” Composer Shruthi Rajasekar commissioned Leader’s text specifically to reflect the unique bonds of community in upper-voice choirs – and to that end, the work is often performed with the choir holding hands. Beloved by community and educational choirs, Palm to Palm is accessible and tender.
Composer’s Notes
I asked Anna, my good friend and frequent collaborator, to write in celebration of the shared knowledge of womxn across time and place. The result was this beautiful text. For Anna, “our connection is wisdom that we’re born with, and even babies know it— that’s why they grab our fingers.”
-Shruthi Rajasekar
Text
My mother’s hips,
Struck through with lightning lines,
The marks that show how she gave life to me;
And in her fist where veins run clear and blue
She still holds my tiny hand in hers.
Palm to palm –
Love is passed
From palm to palm.
Now I hold my mother’s hand in mine,
And I will hold my daughter’s hand like she held mine,
And on and on,
We form a chain –
We do not know whose hands have touched our own,
Whose hands we hold,
Or who will hold our hands in eighty years,
But we have always known this to be true:
We take our leave with handfuls of love,
Passed from palm to palm.
-Anna Leader
$3.00 per licensed PDF
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