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Alumni & Student NewsTawnie Olson | Robert Baker Commission for Sacred Music
The music of Canadian composer Tawnie Olson (Artist Diploma, composition, ISM ’00)has been performed by a wide range of ensembles and individual musicians, including the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gemini Duo, Duo Fiolûtröniq, the Wanmu Percussion Trio, the McGill Percussion Ensemble, the Land’s End Ensemble, the Canadian Chamber Choir, the Guelph Chamber Choir, the Yale Camerata and the Chamber Chorus of the Yale Camerata, bassoonists Nadina Mackie Jackson and Rachael Elliott, and harpsichordist Katelyn Clark. She has won awards from the SOCAN foundation and the Guelph Chamber Choir/Musica Viva, and is a two-time semifinalist in the Sorel Foundation competition.
Her piece Scel lem duib was premiered at the annual Advent concert of the Yale Camerata on December 1. It was commissioned for the Yale Camerata by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music from the Robert Baker Commissioning Fund for Sacred Music. and dedicated to Marguerite Brooks and the Chamber Chorus of the Yale Camerata, with special thanks to Kristan Toczko.
In her note, Olson says: “A medieval Irish monk once wrote: ‘It is senseless for anyone to cease in the praise of God. The birds, they never cease, and their souls are only air.’ As I wrote Scel lem duib, I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of creation, the way plants and animals are always growing and changing, driven to take root, to migrate, to bear fruit by a force much deeper than consciousness. I love the poem “Scel lem duib” because its elegant spareness celebrates winter as a thing-in-itself, as yet another instance of nature’s awful beauty. Unlike many other poems, it does not use the turning seasons as a metaphor for aging and death. As I set the text that is translated “the bracken reddens/its shape becomes hidden,” however, I found myself thinking that all of the beauty of this world is an echo of another country, one where some whom I love are hidden, and where I hope by God’s grace someday to dwell. But before I could become too lost in this thought, a flock of geese intruded, raucously calling out God’s praises in the here-and-now. |
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