LAVINIA KELL PARKER

by Lavinia Kell Parker

SSAATB with piano – CP 1311 – duration 7:45
Songs Are Thoughts was selected to be part of the Canadian Chamber Choir Series. This work, winner of the 2010 ACCC Choral Composition Competition for Original Composition, addresses the nature of music and the potential it creates within us. Inuit inspired rhythmic motives juxtaposed with flowing melodic lines mirror the text in both English and Inuktitut.  Written for a fine choir and a skilled piano player, Songs Are Thoughts can be deeply moving.  The piece can be characterized by Orpingalik’s poignant words:
Songs are thoughts, sung out with breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices. . . .
I sing as I draw breath.

by Lavinia Kell Parker

SATB a cappella – CP 2466 – duration 4:55

Be with me sweet hour of serenity, that I may not hear the darkness shivering with fright.

In 2023, the Polish city of Lodz devoted a year to celebrating the centenary of Chava Rosenfarb, the Yiddish-languge novelist, poet and essayist, who had been imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto by the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. During this time, Rosenfarb wrote poems constantly. In August 1944, the Lodz Ghetto was liquidated and its remaining inhabitants sent to Auschwtiz. At Auschwitz, the knapsack containing Rosenfarb’s poems was ripped from her back and thrown onto a heap of refuse. She survived the selection and was sent to a forced labour camp at Sasel near Hamburg to build houses for the bombed out Germans of that city. At Sasel, she tried to recreate her lost poems by writing them in minute letters on the ceiling above her bunk. She then memorized the poems and erased the markings. After the war, she published these poems in her first book of poems. “A Prayer” is one of the poems recreated from memory.  Goldie Morgentaler