The personal and the universal…
It is an unusual luxury to receive a vocal commission where the choice of text is left open to the composer, so this presented an exciting opportunity to spend time immersed in researching texts. I knew from the start, particularly given the nature of the Composeher remit, that I wanted to use text from a female writer and preferably a Scottish one, so I spent several days trawling through the Scottish Poetry Library resources.
Initially I had thought that I would choose an older text, hoping to avoid any copyright issues, and also because of my interest in traditional material, but I quickly realised I felt far more drawn to contemporary poetry – the language feeling more immediate and the topics generally of greater relevance. Almost by chance I fell upon the poem Margaret’s Moon by Jackie Kay. Jackie is, of course, the current Scots Makar (national Poet Laureate of Scotland), and so I’d avoided really looking at her work, being sure that it would be too popular, and that there would be no chance to get the copyright.
As soon as I read Margaret’s Moon however, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s an incredibly beautiful poem, full of vivid imagery, which creates a sound world subtle enough to juxtapose ‘regret’ with ‘Margaret’, a name that could almost be slurred into ‘my regret’. Perhaps through coincidence, perhaps not, I had spent the past year creating a major work about the complexities of motherhood and this poem by Jackie, about grieving for her birth mother, tied into this theme in such an incredibly poignant way.
Whilst I was immediately sure I wanted to set the work in some way, I had some reservations about whether this would be the right project for it. The poem is so intensely personal, and therefore I hesitated about whether a choral setting would be the right way to honour the text. I realised, however, that the reason I am drawn to the topics I choose to write about is almost always this juxtaposition of the personal and the universal. Whilst the text is intensely personal, the theme of complicated grief is shared by many. I think there is, therefore, something potentially very powerful about performing such an individual text with such a large number of people. In some ways, perhaps, it acknowledges that in the moments when we feel most alone, we never truly are.