Your Name is Water

Commissioned by the Vancouver Chamber Choir – Kari Turunen, Artistic Director

I have always felt a deep and immediate connection to Jeni Couzyn’s poetry, and am grateful she has granted me permission to set so many of her texts. She shared this poem with me in 2023, and as I often do with her poetry, I had a visceral experience reading it for the first time. This text, as I interpret it, expresses a duality: the smallness of our existence, in a moment, in the grand history and future of the earth, paired with the idea that we are one with everything, always; and both of these things are sustaining. The addressee of this poem could be a person, but to me is more likely a greater power we might call “God” or “The Source;” something we glimpse in moments of transcendence when the veil lifts, something we have all experienced in one way or another – and yearn for always – that we are also part of.
This piece starts off with a meditative introduction on the words “your name,” ushering in chant-like phrases that take us to the mid-point of the poem. At this point, a new rhythmic and melodic world and texture begins to unfold, slowly building the dissonance until the apocalyptic moment when the “seas will rise up” and the music takes on a more driving and firey nature, before everything sonically topples into the ocean and we find ourselves back to a richly colourful yet meditative space again.