Directness of text setting is at a premium in
A Thousand Years. Time is simultaneously suspended and set in motion from the outset, and out of that dynamic stasis arises incarnation. The chanted second section reverses the temporal perspective of the first section, and plays with natural speech rhythms onto which are grafted dancing polyrhythms; the powerful hanging ending is a portrayal of human confusion, itself a direct reference to a musical gesture devised by
Mark Edgley Smith when setting a self-contradictory poem by
E E Cummings.
from notes by Jeremy Summerly © 2008
