Video Information

• Choir: Millennium Consort Singers, Martin Neary, conductor; Pomona College Choir, Donna M. Di Grazia, director
• Piece: WaterRuminations - II. Entering the Shell
• Composer:  Tom Flaherty
• Conductor:  Martin Neary
• Voices:  SATBSATB
• Voices:  organ
• Genres: Classical, Contemporary
• ENTERING THE SHELL
  Love is alive, and someone borne
  along by it is more alive than lions
  
  roaring or men in their fierce courage.
  Bandits ambush others on the road.
  
  They get wealth, but they stay in onemoreENTERING THE SHELL
  Love is alive, and someone borne
  along by it is more alive than lions
  
  roaring or men in their fierce courage.
  Bandits ambush others on the road.
  
  They get wealth, but they stay in one
  place. Lovers keep moving, never
  
  the same, not for a second! What
  makes others grieve, they enjoy!
  
  When they look angry, don't believe
  their faces. It's spring lightning,
  
  a joke before the rain. They chew
  thorns thoughtfully along with pasture
  
  grass. Gazelle and lioness, having
  dinner. Love is invisible except
  
  here, in us. Sometimes I praise love;
  sometimes love praises me. Love,
  
  a little shell somewhere on the ocean
  floor, opens its mouth. You and I
  
  and we, those imaginary beings, enter
  that shell as a single sip of seawater.
  
  Texts by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
  © 1995 Coleman Barks. Used by permission.
  
  Performed by the Millennium Consort, Martin Neary, conductor, and the Pomona College Choir, Donna Di Grazia, director.
  
  Water Ruminations is a setting of six poems by the thirteenth-century poet Rumi, in English translations from the Persian by Coleman Barks, for double choir and organ. The poetry sings of literal and spiritual connections between water and sky, a drop of water and human life, flowing water and love, drinking water and its container, the giddiness of spring and rolling seas, and the ocean's gifts and singing. Its images, from 800 years ago, speak to us with both vivid immediacy and transcendence.
  
  The idea for the piece originated with the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, which proposed funding activities that would involve students in artistic experience and creation over the next four years, centered around the uniting theme of the four classical elements of Water, Earth, Air, and Fire. This year's theme being wat...    less