A World of Daughters
The woman’s role as creative and supporting force throughout history forms the basis when Trondheim Voices, Jon Balke, Asle Karstad and the strings sets music to the words of the poet Yusef Komunyakaa. “A World of Daughters” premiered October 2019 in Munich, as a collaborative project between Trondheim Voices, Jon Balke and the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Based on the poem of the same name by Yusef Komunyakaa, Balke has composed a piece of music for strings, voices and electronics that illuminates the poem from several angles. Pulitzer Prize winner Komunyakaa, with his African-American background, is a distinctive musical and rhythmic poet who writes in a pulsating language. The work is written as a framework for the dialogue between the string ensemble and the singers, and allows for Trondheim Voices’ unique abilities as improvisers and sound painters.
Composer and electronics: Jon Balke
Maccatrol and sound design: Asle Karstad
Trondheim Voices:
Sissel Vera Pettersen (artistic leader)
Siri Gjære
Tone Åse
Live Maria Roggen
Kari Eskild Havenstrøm
Anita Kaasbøll
Torunn Sævik
Heidi Skjerve
Munich 2019:
Clemens Schuldt, conductor
Munich Chamber Orchestra
Moldejazz 2020 and Olavsfestdagene 2020:
Christian Eggen, conductor
Trondheim Soloists
In the concert video from Olavsfestdagene 2020, the first part of the music also includes a “remixed” version of the previous collaboration between Balke and Trondheim Voices: “On anodyne. ” Similarly this collaboration based on a poem by Komunyakaa, but then written for percussion and voices.
A World of Daughters
By Yusef Komunyakaa
Say licked clean at birth. Say
weeping in the tall grass, where
this tantalizing song begins,
birds perched on a crooked branch
over a grave of an unending trek
into the valley of cooling waters.
The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth
unmoor the first tongue. Say
I have gone back, says the oracle,
counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault
lines between one generation & next,
as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen,
& one glimpses what one did not know. Say
this is where the goat spoke legends ago
in the ring of fire to deliver a sacrifice.
To feel signs depends on how & why
the singer’s song puckers the mouth.
Well, I believe the borrowed rib
story is the other way round, entangled
in decree, blessing, law & myth. One
only has to listen to nightlong pleas
of a mother who used all thousand
chants & prayers of clay, red ocher
blown from the mouth onto the high
stone wall, retracing land bridge
to wishbone. My own two daughters
& granddaughter, the three know how
to work praise & lament, ready to sprout
wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,
hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy
to clan, from clan to tribe, & today
we worship her sun-polished bones,
remembering she is made of questions.
No, mama is not always the first word
before counting eggs in the cowbird’s
nest. It begins in memory. Now, say
her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.