Songs of Hope, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2023

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You are the Hope by Mrs Ahmed Al Hamwi music by Laura Reid. Featuring Soprano Gweneth Ann Rand and piano by Allyson Devenish. Mrs Ahed Al Hamwi is a writer and translator. Her response to the Dickinson poem is a personification of Hope. You are The Hope You are the light in the dark That enables me to see The beautiful flowers in the park The green colour of a tree You are the Hope To me you are the best friend That straightens the way on the bend You knit from the sun’s thread My way to reach Everest head You are the Hope Let’s run with the Streams Me and you hand in hand To fulfil the unreal dreams Of Alice in Wonder Land You are the Hope Copyright Mrs Ahed Al Hamwi 2023

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Sacred Threads of Crinoids text by Teresa Howard. Music by Laura Reid. Soprano Gwen Ann Rand, piano by Allyson Devenish. Teresa writes : "Emily Dickinson's poem inspired me to write about Crinoids, one of the most ancient forms of sea life from the Echinodermata family, it looks like a bunch of feathers floating gracefully in the deep. Its presence in the sea, having outlived extinctions of other creatures like the dinosaurs, makes it a symbol of survival and hope. The poem is a prayer in homage to the ancient line of the Crinoid." Image by Heidi Stellar. SACRED THREADS Phy-lum Echin-o-der-mata Phy-lum Sacrum Genitori, genitoque Ad Phylum Crinoidae Five hundred million years of life. Five hundred million years. We heard the dying moan of beast from ice and fire, and air and sea. You thought we were the lilies of ancient shallow waters, but animal adaptable we learned to move, evolve, survive. We have nothing that a human needs. We take nothing that a human wants. We were here before and will watch you leave, unless you hold the door, amid your blast and roar! Hear my secret scripture Hear me call beneath the wave Hope is floating feather lilies Hope learns to weather any change. Phy-lum Echin-o-der-mata Phy-lum Sacrum Genitori, genitoque Ad Phylum Crinoidae. Copyright Teresa Howard 2023 Translation: Phy-lum Echin-o-der-mata (Latin name for the genus they belong to, including starfish etc.) Phy-lum Sacrum (sacred thread) Genitori, genitoque (begotten and begotten) Ad Phylum Crinoidae (the thread of crinoids) copyright Teresa Howard 2023.

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Words by Oge Nwosu, Music by Laura Reid, Vocals spoken and sung by Gweneth Ann Rand. Additional vocals by Nwenenda Horsefall. Image by Heidi Stellar. Oge Kpalukwuozu Nwosu is a UK based librettist and former barrister. An alumna of Cambridge University and Guildhall, her MA chamber opera, produced in association with ROH, was recommissioned by the V&A Museum. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and an Invited Artist at the Women Opera Makers Workshop of the Academie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. SUSTENANCE: Tête á Tête Note, July 2023. Recently I wrote a micro-opera with Laura, titled Detritus. Commissioned by ROH Jette Parker programme and Casco Phil as a site specific piece, performed at St Pancras Station on International Women’s Day, its protagonist was St Anthony of Padua, Patron Saint of Lost Things, involuntarily transplanted into life as a Cleaner at the station. He was essentially a Displaced Person - one who had never set foot on a national or international train - struggling to make sense of his purpose in that place and time. That theme - movement compelled under unfathomable circumstances - set a precedent for the work I have subsequently created with Laura. While the real and fictional global micro-stories contained in Sustenance should sit ‘naturally’ in the context of the London walk, my primary impulse was to bring The World to the rural setting of the original project. Because, as Laura has perspicaciously observed, The World has passed through Dorset across history; animate and inanimate entities, transported by ship and air and foot, travel and trade and learning and aid, colouring fields and coasts and conversations. So, movement of all kinds. This lyric - if it can be called that - gives voice to headlines rather than people, and exists as much in its footnotes as in the sparsely sketched stories. The people represent a multiplicity of footnotes in recent history, each one at a liminal point between grief and hope, survival and erasure. No comment is made on the events and no specific emotion is demanded of the listener. The separate lines of text are united by one repeated phrase; Nka bu örom. The choice of Ikwerre as the language of this phrase is both as random and as specific as each of the stories it follows. Two facts make it relevant to me as the writer of the piece; Ikwerre is the language of the part of Rivers State, Nigeria, in which my father was born; and this phrase was the first he taught me. It means This is my house. I used to enjoy saying it when we welcomed guests into the unfamiliar houses we moved into. Here, in this lyric, it extends to mean something like the Earth is home to all of us. Beyond that, there is no direct connection between the language and the acts outlined here, just as there is no direct link between a human being’s innate essence and the random bolts of fortune that might unexpectedly assail them. I use it to capture a spirit of welcome, or stoicism, a brief reflection on radical acts that embody or sustain hope. The deliberately un-poetic text begins with the journey of a foetus from its dying mother into a hostile, fractured world. This was an imagined story, written months before the most recent instance of real life appearing to intersect with fiction. The succeeding lines all reference singular personal events, huge in the lives of those living through them, all or some of which you will be aware of from news sources. Links to these lives are included in the footnotes to the lyric. Oge Kpalukwuozu Nwosu July 2023. SUSTENANCE1 Theffania quickening, in the carriage - crushed.2 Nka bu örom. Pia steering, a small boy’s body frozen on the boat.3 Nka bu örom. Aamira, at the station, with a ticket and her textbooks.4 Nka bu örom. Ines embroiders ‘Assamaka’ on the shoes she leaves behind.5 Nka bu örom. Nasruddin, defiant, wades the water for the women.6 Nka bu örom. Anakaren cries before a camera, for a prize.7 Nka bu örom. Johannes, aged, with the bruises of the blows of the hammer to his head.8 Nka bu örom. This woman, nameless, grasps a knife, inscribes - 9 Nka bu örom. 1 A multiplicity of contemporary voices, real and fictional, each at a liminal point between grief and hope, all united through a single phrase; “Nka bu örom.” (Ikwerre.) Translation: “This is my house”. (And, by extension, here, “The Earth is home to us all.”) It is used here in a spirit of stoicism, or welcome - radical activity that sustains hope. 2 ‘Quickening’ as in feeling the foetus move inside her. 3 Captain Pia Klemp, TedxBerlin, 2019. https://youtu.be/-7V1zNNfc_Q 4 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/10/home-office-backs-down-over-travel- costs-for-eritrean-refugeesitting-gcses?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther 5 https://niger.iom.int/stories/sewing-centre-support-womens-resilience-assamaka 6 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/26/indonesian-villagers-defy-covid-19-warnings- to-rescue-rohingyarefugees?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther 7 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/world/americas/mexico-day-of-the-dead.html? smid=nytcore-ios-share%20https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/world/americas/mexico-day- of-the-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare 8 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pensioner-79-told-shouldnt-country-23039708 9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53436335 Copyright Oge Nwosu 2023

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You are the Hope 2 words by Ahed Al Hamwi, Soprano Gweneth Ann Rand, Piano Allyson Devenish, Cello Laura Reid. Image by Heidi Stellar.

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