Yukon Time

This piece was written for Elektra in Vancouver, BC, commissioned in memory Amanda Taylor, the sister of one Elektra’s singers. Amanda, who passed away at age 33, lived in the Yukon and was a very active outdoors person, and so nature and the seasons are important themes in the piece. Elektra commissioned Yukon poet Clea Roberts to create new poetry for the work. About her approach to the two poems she composed, Clea says:

“I received some wonderful stories from Kim, Amanda’s sister, that really helped inform the scaffolding of the poem with the sense of curiosity, adventure, generosity and community for which Amanda was known.
The title ‘Yukon time’ is a play on the local saying that time passes differently in the territory than elsewhere but also a nod that the Yukon was a time in Amanda’s life that was significant to her.
The poem is written in two parts but runs the full cycle of a Yukon year. My intent was to impart a sense of connectedness to the landscape and climate in the poems, throughout the seasons, though the focus is on winter (winter being very long in Yukon). I chose to write the poems with a seasonal thread running through them because I find the metaphor of time passing in nature to be a nice opening to consider our finite, unique presence in the world.
I tried to give the sense of an “us” in the poem as the words will be sung by a choir but also because Amanda was someone who liked to gather with friends and family. I also tried to give a sense of the passing of time through enchanted moments in a life lived fully.
The poem sits somewhere between an ode and an elegy. There is joy in the poem, though the sadness of loss sits quietly in the white space of the page, the unspoken words and the moments of silence/caesura.”

In places throughout the piece, I’ve tried to capture the joy and sadness of loss that Clea so beautifully crafted. The first movement places the voices in a low and vulnerable range in a melody that unfolds slowly, honouring the spaces between the words. The second movement opens with the bright, overflowing energy of spring, through changes as we get into the magical words about the “small cave” that truly captured my imagination. When I first read Clea’s poems, I was deeply moved by the final lines “until its last bright seed floats away” and felt that the music needed to stay with those lines for some time to allow space for the emotion of it to unfold and settle.