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Joan Szymko

Joan Szymko is widely regarded as an outstanding composer of choral music in America today. With a catalog of over 100 choral works in print, her music is sung regularly at choral festivals and competitions across North America and abroad and for nearly two decades has been heard on stage or in sessions at every...

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Joan Szymko Music

Reaching Back from Here

Name: Reaching Back from Here
SKU: JS-106
Availability: InStock

Joan Szymko

The healing that accompanies releasing the past, with all its pain and beauty.

fall, secular, spring, summer

Difficulty: 3

Duration: 3-5 min.

JS-106

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SATB, piano

Poignant and lyrical, commissioned in remembrance to honor a beloved founding director. Szymko’s setting of the poem by Nancy Wood conveys the healing that accompanies releasing the past, with all its pain and beauty.

Text

Reaching back from here
All that I remember of my life
Are the great round rocks and not
The unimportant stones.
I know that I experienced pain and yet The scars have healed so that
I am like the tree covering itself
With new growth every year.
I know that I walked in sadness
and yet
All that I remember now
Is the soothing autumn light.
I know that there was much to
make my life unhappy
If I had stopped to notice how
The world sings a broken song.
But I preferred to dwell within
A universe of fields and streams
Which echoed the wholeness of my song.