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Joshua Shank
Joshua Shank (B&F Music)
Your children (are not your children) (TTBB Piano Score)
A work about raising children set to a classic text by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran.
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Your children (are not your children)
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Your children (are not your children)
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Your children (are not your children)
TTBB and 4-Hands Piano
This score is 4-Hands Piano Score only.
Originally composed for the Minnesota All-State Mixed Choir in 2010, this approachable work takes each phrase of the poetry—Khalil Gibran’s classic, On Children—and “grows” it word by word as a musical metaphor for raising a child.
Composer’s Notes
In the early stages of writing this piece I concluded that the simpler I kept the music, the closer it would be to the intention of Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran’s amazing text about the stewardship of raising a child. In the writing I attempted to represent this by taking a melodic idea and “growing” it one note at a time until it became the entire line of text; slow, repetitive development that eventually yields what is hopefully something beautiful. Not a bad metaphor for parenthood, I think.
– Joshua Shank
Text
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
(Adapted by the composer)
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