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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

Vox Matris

Name: Vox Matris
SKU: JS-133
Availability: InStock

Joan Szymko

All the love, protection, and shining guidance that a mother can hope to give.

Difficulty: 3

Duration: 5-10 min.

JS-133

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SSAA, piano

Beginning in a simple unison— direct, compelling, loving; with dramatic intent,”Vox Matris” swells with all the love, protection, and shining guidance that a mother can hope to give. Though penned in 1923, (the singular poem by Dorothy Petgen’s published in Poetry, the Magazine of Verse), the poet’s words ring out with relevance in today’s world.

Text

I have given you sight 
Beyond my eyes— 
For star-braided mountains, 
And for all things invisible and amazing.

I have taken a fragile fire 
Out of my heart, 
That I might give you light to find a
shining 
Beyond these luminous shadows,  
And this disastrous darkness.

I have given you the singing of my veins  
For a melody; 
It shall outsoar all prayers and all crying,  
And all silence.

I blind, see bewildering visions; 
I, sitting in shadow, am drenched with
sunrises; 
Dumb, I am consumed with music. 
Having given all things, I possess all things, 
Save you only.

-Dorothy Petgen (1923)

$2.75 per licensed PDF