Sven-David Sandström, "To See a World"

USC Thornton Recital Choir
Daniel Strychacz, Conductor
(Masters Recital, March 2015)
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
--William Blake (1757-1827)
The music of To See a World (2008) undulates, expanding and contracting, creating a soundscape that seems at once a cosmos and microcosm. He sets the first stanza of William Blake’s (1757-1827) poem “To see a World in a Grain of Sand” which explores paradoxes of space and time. Sandström deconstructs the text, repeating fragments of each line. By adding new words on some repetitions, Sandström builds the meaning of the text slowly over time. The repetitions create an “infinity” of tiny pieces, that you could hold “in the palm of your hand.” Each section of the work builds and flows into the next, climaxing with a tremendous series of clashing chords on the word “Heaven,” that seem to defy resolution. Sandström exquisitely unfurls these harmonies in the work’s concluding section, creating an aural space that is the kaleidoscopic composite of the previous “infinity” of dissonances.