Old Waters

Words by Kent Meyers
SATB (div) a cappella
Published by Fresh Ayre Music

Kent Meyers grew up on a farm near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. He wrote about his boyhood years in The Witness of Combines, a collection of autobiographical essays from which the text of this piece is taken, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1998. About the chapter entitled “Old Waters” he writes:

I spent the first eighteen years of my life farming. I didn’t just live on the land,
I lived with it, and it was driven into my consciousness—and skin—on a daily
basis. I’ve written about how this influenced me, how it formed a sense of myth
in me, of living in a world larger than the present. I grew up with a sense of big
land, big waters, and great age–this latter coming primarily…from my awareness
of the glaciers that gouged the upper Midwest thousands of years ago.

This piece was written as part of the Minnesota Voices project of the American Composers Forum in celebration of the state’s sesquicentennial in 2008.

Perusal Score (click to view)