Lot's Wives

Written for the Chapel Choir of University College, Oxford, Giles Underwood, Director of Music. This setting of Pireeni Sundaralingam's poem LOT'S WIVES (about the Sri Lankan Civil War that took place between 1983-2009) was written in June of 2023, during the war between Russia and Ukraine and four months before the escalation between Israel and Palestine. Bruce Adolphe describes the work: “As a composer, I was drawn to the way the poem looks back in time as the women look back on destruction, creating a temporal counterpoint of past and present. To set these words, I combined the sorrowful lyricism of looking back to the past with the fierce dissonance of present violence. The cello plays several roles: it triggers memory; it comments on the text and on the music that is sung; it provides accompaniment.”