NEW - Hrafnsöngvar - Ravensongs: A Glimpse of Iceland - June 24, 2025

Hrafnsöngvar - Ravensongs
Composed 2001; World Premiere, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, October 29 2005

Rosalind Page - Music
Hrafn Andrés Harðarson - Texts  

Australian Music Centre
https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/product/hrafnsoengvar-ravensongs-a-tone-poem-on-seven-texts-by-hrafn-andres-hardarson-escore 

Incidental Music
Ólafur Arnalds / Ljósið;    Eydís Evenson / Dagdraumur 

  1    In The Beginning
  Darkness
  Blue mantle
  Black bordered  
  Vision  
  In the ocean
  stars
  medusae
  Night pregnant
  with darkness

  2    Morning
  Caught in the net
  of the morning glare
  Never reaching day:
  night birds
  beating
  with both wings
  blood
  blood on their breasts
  from their own claws

  3   Birds Of Heaven
  Notes from the Creator’s harp
  glide above clouds
  on feathered wings
  below
  ie in the air
  like promises …
  Tone-birds
  on the ocean’s keyboard.


  4    Life Itself (Hildur’s Dance)
  Between heaven and ocean
  our happiness:
  Lands that ancestors saw
  with birds and mountains
  and rivers
  flowing like time
  Strange seed
  of all time, all tide
  rising and falling
  resonating earth
  rising and never ending
  As far as the eye can see
  the eye of god
  All years
  tears
  are lost and disappear,
  no, reappear
  forever
  in the eternal breath
  between sea and sky

  5    Prophecy
  Evening birds
  flee the day’s sadness
  into the shadowed embrace
  of night
  there where I often
  seek daydreams
  like a fan-winged raven
  seeks a prophecy
  of a new day
  like yesterday …

  6    Rain Of Pearls
  Tiny drop
  tiny drop,
  pearl amongst pearls
  in your eye
  a vision of your world
  in your eye
  an image of your god

  7    O, Frón (Iceland), Your Mother …
  Dead calm, flat
  lies the ocean at ease
  and stares deep, deep
  into a sunny blue,
  star-clear sky
  that has always been
  and that never sleeps …
  Featherlight fingers of breeze
  play
  on bird-viols
  mermaids dance
  beneath an aeolian heaven
  that never sleeps …
  Lighthearted waves
  aroused by the swell
  play with cinders
  from the sun
  that never sleeps …
  quiet snow, rain
  or mystical mist
  covering with a bare veil
  the billowing sea
  that never sleeps …
  then up from the tormented silence
  of sleeping Ægir
  breaking its way
  through green-deep waves
  swelling, booming crested seas
  of the violent ocean
  that never sleeps …
  a burning, glowing, raging river
  of melting metal and bursting stones
  ashgrey, black
  screaming, bright
  spitting oozing with urgent fury
  to heaven
  toward a burning sun
  that never sleeps …
  Your birth, my land,
  was like a fatal disease
  no-one welcomed you
  but your mother, the ocean,
  protects you and feeds you
  and never, no, never she sleeps.

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