It strikes me that the world at large would just as soon pretend that the COVID 19 pandemic never happened – and people resist remembering the trauma of those years. Not me. As hospitals flooded with the sick, I sat at home writing music, my thoughts flooded with awareness of the pain of loss everywhere, death reaching out in every direction, all around the world. At the time, seeing the typical human responses to the unwanted hand of natural catastrophe (we have behaved just as badly, if not worse, in every plague throughout history) I thought about the 1918 flu pandemic from the last century. It was as I was exploring such thoughts that I discovered Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poignant book “Kyrie” – a set of sonnets about the 1918 pandemic and the world that existed in America at the time. This music sets five poems from that brilliant book.
The thought repeatedly occurs to me these days, as anger and anxiety are felt worldwide and war threatens, that much of that is a rebound from the internalized and repressed fear that lingers in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. People may not want to remember – and certainly don’t want to relive such feelings. For such as those, don’t listen.