How’ll You Know
$2.75
SATB with divisi, unaccompanied
8:00
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The Story
A series of haunting existential questions, posed as if by a pack of wolves, forms the text of this 10th collaboration between composer Jake Runestad and poet Todd Boss. Rather than write an attempted explication of the sound, or anthropomorphize it, or comment upon it, Todd chose to imagine it as an inquiry, a sounding in the dark, a plumbing of depths, that invites listener interpretation, thereby retaining its mystery. The text's interrogatives are infused with o and oo vowels and diphthongs designed to give the choir a unique sonic palette worthy of wolves' most eerie and inscrutable vocalizations. The musical lines enact a subtle passage of leadership from traditionally male to female voices, inviting questions about what humans can learn from the gender-roles and socializations exhibited by other species.
Text
How'll You Know by Todd Boss
Who'll you follow through the snow?
How'll you know where you need to go?
Are our hours ours alone?
How are you more than the store of your bones?
Nobody knows we howl in vain
under the thunder and the roar of rain.
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