WINGATE: SONG OF THE SEERESS
for Women’s Voices and Two Harps

(THIS PROJECT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS)

Instrumentation:
Women’s Chorus [SSAA] and 2 Concert Harps 

Text:
(Old Norse) The Poetic Edda - The Prophesy of the Seeress (Völuspá); vv. 1 - 6.

(I.)   

Hljóðs bið ek allar 

    helgar kindir, 

meiri ok minni 

    mögu Heimdallar; 

viltu, at ek, Valföðr! 

    vel framtelja 

forn spjöll fíra, 

    þau er fremst um man.
(etc.)
 

Hearing I ask 

    from the holy races,

From Heimdall's sons, 

    both high and low;

Thou wilt, Valfather, 

    that well I relate

Old tales I remember 

    of men long ago.

(translation by Henry Adams Bellows, 1936)

Notes:
Wingate’s Song of the Seeress tells the Old Norse tale of the creation of the world, as well as the creation of time itself, using only six verses from the celebrated Völuspá (‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’) of the Poetic Edda. Much of our modern understanding of Viking mythology and Germanic Heldenleben comes from this material, but the verses themselves speak in a lucid directness, contrary to many preconceived notions of prophetic archaisms. Here the alliterative verse known as fornyrdislag (‘old-story metre’) is scattered amongst the women’s voices like so many runic stones, and the harps provide a subdued and oracular backdrop to the cosmogonic proceedings. The subdued dissonance of the high voices was inspired by a performance by the Swedish Radio Choir of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna and Alfred Schnittke’s 1972 work Voices of Nature.