Absence (2022)

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Details
​Description: Choir

Duration: 5'

Instrumentation: SSATB

​Commission: Commissioned by the Micklegate Singers

First performance: December 3rd 2022, Late Music Festival, York

Score link:

Recording: 

Programme Note
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Text
Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas;
they live in one another still.
 
If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs.
 
For they must needs be present, 
that love and live in the Omnipresent,
that love and live in that which is Omnipresent.
They live in one another still.
 
If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs.
 
This is the Comfort of the Good,
That the Grave cannot hold them,
and that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning over from time to eternity.
If we cannot bear to die,
we cannot love to live.
 
If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs.
 
This is the Comfort of the Good,
That the Grave cannot hold them,
and that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning over from time to eternity.
We cannot love to live,
if we cannot bear to die.

​William Penn, from Quaker Faith and Practice, adapted by Joe Bates