Jane Sheldon

Music by Jane Sheldon

Text by Etel Adnan

Performed live by Roger Benedict and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows

This piece is a setting of fragments from Conversations with My Soul, a long poem by Etel Adnan, in which the speaker seems to be addressing a lover, a natural force (specifically, fog), and the self, all conflated into one entity at once familiar, faintly intimidating, and in need of comfort; and all able to be interpreted as something divine. Her poem opens with the line, “come along my fog.” In Colloque, the vocal line is intended to be incantatory while being relatively static, an invocation always held within the gently mobile timbral fog provided by the ensemble.