The Land that Birthed Me by Silen Wellington

The Land that Birthed Me is an exploration of ancestral land connection and particularly my connection to the land Norway, where the majority of my ancestors immigrated from. I wrote it in preparation to visit Norway for the first time, as a calling card of sorts, to guide me there and offer song to the land upon my arrival. This video features Tessa Romano, mezzo and Terence Dennis, piano from a performance at the University of Otago, Ōtepot, Aotearoa New Zealand. Movement 1 features a single line of text: “The land that birthed me has never known my taste.” This line is inspired by something one of the composer’s friends, Fio Gede Parma, often says: “We breathe in the land, but the land also breathes us” and the longing for the animal body to be known and breathed by the land of blood ancestors. Movement 2, “Would I Could I,” begins with stuttering syllables, reminiscent of Berio’s Sequenza III or Nico Muhley’s Mothertongue: I. Archive. Gradually, these stutters turn into an exuberant song to catapult us over the ocean. Movement 3, “Freyja Speaks” uses text from the Poetic Edda, a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript containing Old Norse poems by a variety of unknown authors. The particular verse in this movement comes from the “Þrymskviða” poem, in which Freyja lends Loki a falcon cloak to traverse between the realms. I came across this verse during a session of bibliomancy in devotion to Freyja. Sung in English and Old Norse, this movement is a love poem to the descendent seeking reunion with the animism of the composer’s ancestry.