CARMEN BRADEN

by Carmen Braden

SSAA with piano – CP 2195 – duration 1:58
(instruments parts available)

I dug into the sounds of the words themselves for Heather; the softness of the “h” and the “th” consonants, the gentle vowels, sounded as gentle and scratchy as the heather itself. And as the poem goes on to list some of the other fantastic-sounding plant names that all make up the moorlands, it becomes almost a tongue-twister of a journey for the singers, just like exploring a landscape.

When the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – widely used in schools around the world – was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. The words were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attach-ment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions – the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual – became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.

by Carmen Braden

SSAA with piano – CP 2199 – duration 2:10
(instruments parts available)

I was captivated by this imagining of Robert Macfarlane’s Lark – “a little astronaut heading out into space, singing its song – the company of exploding suns.” It brings to mind how the power of small sounds, small words, things that seem small at first glance can have a real strength, and sometimes be the thing that reaches farthest and deepest into the unknown.

“Lark” is the 12th movement from the collection of 20 songs/poems entitled “The Lost Words“.