Music for SATB chorus a cappella by Pamela J. Marshall

Deepest Shade

About the music

This is a very personal piece of music. The text came to me as I contemplated my father's increasing dementia. The repeated words in different forms, the incomplete phrases that are still full of resonances and internal meaning, signify to me the loss of communication, the loss of understanding and companionship, but not the loss of love. Dementia is a death that doesn't end, cannot heal and that wrenches my soul. I needed to put these thoughts into music to make them bearable.

 

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The poem

Deepest Shade

by Pamela Marshall   April 2010

Long, far and long, and longing
with outstretched arm
for fading light --
it's evening, the long twilight

words are songs
is thought
is what I know

becoming what
I do not know
fading fading

word become
song become
our refrain is
minor sadder softer oscuro olvido

repeat repeat repeat
by heart -- memorized -- do not let go
engrave it in a stone-like permanence
never to forget
until night falls
and shadows put my dreams in deepest shade