Earthward, Ever Circling

Duration:

12'

"The living need light, the dead need music". The quote is from a Vietnamese Buddhist funeral ritual, where different forms of music are used to prepare the soul of the newly deceased for reincarnation. Funeral music is an important part of Vietnamese cultural heritage and tradition, that along with many rites across the world is about to disappear. The string trio Earthward, Ever

Circling (2023) is the first piece in a series where I'm interested in how funeral music is used as a means of communication between living and dead, between the present and eternity. In the piece,

this is reflected in the way the phrases move through different registers. They reach down towards the earthly and up towards the divine and eternal. The music constantly alternates between these

stages. Like the soul's possible movements to its next life, the different elements in the music have different speed and weight, some parts swirling more hectically, while others parts are more static, waiting.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is one of the Western thinkers who embraced the idea of reincarnation. In his poem "Gesang der Geister über den Wassern", he writes about how the human soul resembles water; coming from heaven, to heaven it rises, and again it returns to earth, in an eternal, alternating movement. I discovered an English translation of the poem done by the American writer Adam Sedia (b. 1984), where the last verse reads "earthward, ever circling", which is the background for the title of this piece.