Some Recent Treble Voice Commissions 1

Title: Your Songs (SSA and piano)
Text: Joseph Mary Plunkett (1873-1916)
Commissioned by: Women of Note, Patricia Rabson, conductor, Winnipeg, MB
Premiere: May 4, 2014, Manitoba Legislature
Available Through: Canadian Music Centre

Commissioned as part of the choir's 20th anniversary celebrations. Joseph Mary Plunkett was an Irish Catholic poet who was executed by the British for his part in the Easter Rebellion, 1916.

Your Songs

If I have you then I have everything
In One, and that One nothing of them all
Nor all compounded, and within the wall
Beneath the tower I wait to hear you sing:
Love breathing low above the breast of Spring,
Pressing her heart with baby heart and small
From baby lips love-syllables lets fall
And strokes with gentle hand her quivering wing.

You come rejoicing all the wilderness,
Filling with praise the land to joy unknown,
Fresh from that garden whose perfumes have blown
Down through the valley of the cypresses--
O heart, you know not your own loveliness,
Nor these your songs, for they are yours alone.

Joseph Mary Plunkett