Chilcott: Songs my Heart has Taught Me

It was a privilege and an honour to be invited to write the Raymond Brock Memorial Commission for the ACDA National Conference in Dallas in 2021. I was asked to write something that embraced certain aspects of diversity: a rich, beautiful, and complex subject. I asked a brilliant young poet, Delphine Chalmers, to come on this journey with me to create this piece. As the National Conference ended up taking place virtually, this piece was first performed by the BBC Singers with pianist Anna Tilbrook, in a video recording to be broadcast to delegates.
I have learnt so much from a life of extensive travel, through music and collaboration with many different people, but the overriding thing is that, as Maya Angelou says in her great poem ‘Human Family’, ‘We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike’. Throughout life, music has been my barometer; it has helped me to understand so many things and so many people, and I hold this deep in my heart, hence the title Songs my Heart has Taught Me. Delphine and I decided to use musical concepts as titles for the four songs that make up the work, exploring how these can help us to understand commonality.
The first song, Unison, is an anthem to unity that ends with the powerful line, ‘The song of the future and the song of our souls are in unison’. Harmony, written in a more fluid, musical-theatre style, touches on peoples need to be accepted, in a way like a note in a chord, in such a way that we can feel embraced, as Delphine writes so eloquently: ‘In the song of shared acceptance lies an inner harmony’. The third song, Rhythm, is a spiky piece with a beat that tells of lifes rhythm, of the pulse that the living all share, and it urges us to seize the day. Finally, in Resolution, the melody is spun by the singers over a simple, recurring chord structure. The poetic refrain is strongly influenced by the words of the 14th-century female mystic, Julian of Norwich: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’. The piece ends quietly and tonally, but of course does not completely resolve. That is the story of life. (bron: Bob Chilcott)