ORA Singers/Tate Modern Commission

I’m happy to have finally completed my ORA Singers/Tate Modern commission - an eight-part choral work responding to Ibrahim El-Salahi’s work Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams. That painting was perfect for me to respond to, its darkness & multilayered symbolic surrealism really spoke to me & I’m very grateful to ORA Singers for the opportunity.

Not quite finding the right text for how I was perceiving it, I decided to write my own again. I wanted something right ‘on the blade’, as it were, where you can interpret what’s being said in a couple or a number of ways, particularly when the music sways the intention of how it might be read. I also wanted something where the structure flowed into itself at points but not others, & for it to appear to adhere to structural and metrical form, but doesn’t… & of course, as is usually my want, text that both sounds good and reads well on the page.

Here’s what I came up with:

©SSantos,2021

For now, here’s a video of my interview with Hannah Nepil/The Cusp alongside fellow composer James Wilson where I say a little more on the commission. I hope you’ll get to hear it post-pandemic: