Anyone Can Sing
Composed by: Andrea Ramsey
Year composed: 2015
Text by: William Ayot
Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.
Duration: 5:15
Program Notes:
“When I first contacted the poet William Ayot for permission to set his stunning text, he was excited, kind, and gracious. I asked him about the poem’s origin—what inspired it, and his response completely shaped my compositional approach to the piece. I did my best to honor William’s story with the melodic content and musical painting of the text.” — Andrea Ramsey
“There are many elements to the writing of any poem. In this case, I had just been commissioned to write and read a poem at the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for the 400th Anniversary of the very first performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Reading the poem—alone on stage, without a mic, to an audience of about fifteen hundred people—had been a profoundly moving event for me. I was born without a roof to my mouth (no soft palate). My mother’s milk apparently ran down my nostrils when I was fed, and my parents were told that I wouldn’t be able to speak properly—and that I would never ever sing. So, having made my way through childhood neglect and abuse, adult isolation, breakdown, recovery and eventual redemption, I was ripe to appreciate the depth of the journey I had made—a journey that had brought me from a kind of hopeless grunting to ‘singing’ my own words alone on the stage of Shakespeare’s own theatre. The core of the piece is the line about descending to ‘the last dark hiding place’ and the ’empty’ core that we fear we will find when we begin to peel away the layered onion of our personalities… the tearing away of your pretences and defences until you are left with nothing to hide behind. There’s something about standing naked and ashamed that is both searingly painful and fundamentally redemptive… one is stripped down to one’s barest essentials and led back to life—reborn if you will—like the ancient bards and skalds.” — William Ayot
Additional Notes
Vocal Parts: SSA
Instrumentation: Piano
Language: English
Text:
Anyone can sing.
You just open your mouth,
and give shape to a sound.
Anyone can sing.
What is harder is to proclaim the soul,
to give the voice broad,
sonorous wings of solitude,
grief, and celebration.
to prise the reluctant heart wide open,
to witness defeat, suffer contempt,
shrink, lose face,
retreat to the last, dark hiding place.
the tattered remnants of your pride,
to know these rags as your only protection
and yet still open and sing from that,
and sing to fill the void,
and sing with ev’ry hurt,
ev’ry harm, ev’ry hard-won joy
that staves off death, yet honours its coming,
to sing both full and utterly empty,
alone and conjoined,
exiled and at home.
Anyone can sing.
Yes anyone can sing.