So it was I (2019)| Bussewitz-Quarm by Michael Bussewitz-Quarm published on 2019-11-25T14:53:39Z Based on the poem by Euan Tait Commissioned and Performed by The Esoterics, Eric Banks, Founding Director SATB divisi, unaccompanied. Available through MB Arts and soon through MusicSpoke and local distributors. “So it was I" I met with the morning, and then it was stranger to me: the trees shattered on the ground, the branches like the beauty of human limbs as tender as the finger that once touched and shaped them, broken by the roar of many rages, the leaves still bleeding water as sweet as the air tasted by the tongue, and still green from this resonant spring: all night I’d cowered in the dark, afraid, lying in terror at conflict’s brutal music sounding from these far hills as if it were my civil war, my fire, my anger, being played out in these battlefield woods and fields. On the air a spirit cry, a faint flicker: I met a young man, fighter, little more than the age of my child, lying in the wrecked grass, his gauze breath fragile, almost fading, passing like the soft breeze that troubled the threads of my hair. At that moment, there was no one else to do this, so it was I who was the reluctant, terrified healer, who carried him, carried him, stranger, home. ©Euan Tait 2016. Genre Classical Comment by GHALA ا 2020-09-16T11:28:26Z Comment by Euan Tait (librettist) The setting is utterly haunting and so deeply beautiful. 2019-11-30T12:04:02Z