Grief is inevitable. From the loss of a particular moment or day, to the death of a beloved person or one’s sense of belonging,
encountering and processing grief is, in many ways, the ongoing condition of existence. Written by my life partner of over
twenty years, the text for this song highlights for me the importance of honouring this essential dimension of the human experience. I interpret this poem to be about the transcendence of connecting to the greater and deep expansive internal calling for “a knowing” of where one truly belongs—a haunting of the self by the self, an idea that is echoed in the use of two different voices in the song.

There are a total of twelve lines in this poem, including a clear palindromic form in the middle four lines, which suggest using a setting that incorporates some application of dodecaphonic technique. Lines like “From kin to gone, from skin to wrong” and “From theft to found, from lost to stir,” are monosyllabic eight-word phrases that add a strong symmetry to the poem. Each of these four-word sentences are sung with a series of 0134 tetrachords related to each other through transformational inversion as a way to mirror the grammatical and symbolic meaning of the words. As the tetrachords invert, so too does the meaning of one word to another, from “kin” to “gone” or from “lost” to “stir.”

The parallels that exist between the beginning and ending of the poem are represented by two symmetrical scales, the whole-tone and chromatic scales, respectively. Although there is a clear difference in sound, there is a preservation of symmetry through the intervallic structure of each of these scales, alluding to underlying themes in the text about change and belonging, and perhaps suggesting that change is possible by conceptually retaining certain essential characteristics. There is also a very deliberate use of tension between the presence, absence, or manipulation of pulse in the piece, as it relates to the metaphorical ocean or fluidity that is central in the poem. The juxtaposition of harmony and dissonance, old and new composition techniques, are presented here as a way of bending temporal distances between the historical and contemporary, not as an example of post-modernistic plurality, but rather as a sincere embodiment or an inhabiting of musical styles that moves past irony and referentiality—a blending that conveys the in-betweenness or sense of flux between the past and future, between kin and self.

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