Name: Watching the Perseids: Remembering the Dead by John Hopkins
Duration: 8 min 10 s
Description: This is the final song in the cycle Watching the Perseids, which I have orchestrated as a memorial for the poet Peter Scupham (1933 - 2022), whose wonderful words I have set in these songs. It catches up all the threads from the previous five songs and goes on to establish an elegaic mood of remembrance.

On first glance, it appeared little disturbing to my ears. But the closer I listen the more I feel the spirit of your music. Fascinating style !

Outten About

Production Note
https://furicomusicteam.blogspot.com/p/equatorial-deliverance.html

Equatorial Deliverance

Collaboration between Eric Heitmann, Patrick Zelinski and Ryan Dimmock.

Music Videos here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kctUC8NKsKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJ-w0ukR44

Trail Of Redemption - Eric Heitmann Patrick Zelinski & Ryan Dimmock

Chopin: Nocturne in E minor, Op. posth. 72 no. 1

Bound (Taken Version)

K G G - Voodoo Train

https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/product/our-duty-to-care-song-cycle-for-soprano-piano-trio

Our Duty to Care is a cross-disciplinary music composition based on the legal case Sharma v Minister for the Environment [2021] FCA 560, where eight Australian teenagers (namely Anjali Sharma and Isolde Raj-Seppings, Ambrose Hayes, Tomas Arbizu, Bella Burgemeister, Laura Kirwan, Ava Princi & Luca Saunders) represented by an octogenarian nun (Sister Marie Brigid Arthur) as their litigation guardian, sued the Minister for the Environment (Cth) and Vickery Coal Pty Ltd.
They successfully argued that the Minister owed them and other Australian children a duty of care, which was supposedly breached when the Minister approved the extraction of coal from a coal mine.

Whilst this decision was later successfully appealed by the Minister, this case monumentally established that climate change is legally real – with all submitted scientific evidence un-refuted. This denotes a significant shift, as we are no longer fighting to prove our climate crisis, but rather urging all to fight the crisis itself.

This work sets newly commissioned text by poet, close friend & regular collaborator Savanna Wegman, who has re-interpreted my own legal research about the case into a 3-part poem, which has in turn structured the song cycle. It embodies climate anxiety, the nervous excitement of the trial and its success, and the melancholic yet hopeful transference of ideology: how far we’ve come & how far we still have left to go.
Composed as part of and made possible by a 2022/23 University of Melbourne Wattle Fellowship.

Timing: ~ 18 minutes 
1: Robed in Apocalypse (~6min)
2: they will rise, as birds fall (~5min)
3: The Changing Wilds (~7min)

Written for Bridgette Kelsey and Solstice Trio. Dedicated to all current and future generations of Australians who inherit a climate crisis. 

Bridgette Kelsey, soprano
SOLSTICE
Isabel Hede, violin (guest)
Stephanie Arnold, cello 
Georgina Lewis, piano

Commissioned Cover Art Illustration © by Lucinda McIntyre.

Commissioned Sext Text: ‘Prophecy, as a fire comes’ by Savanna Wegman © 2022 
Text used for 1: Robed in Apocalypse:
No more prophecy 
until the sky begets a softer 
Everlasting sun 
or
the youth unravel 
braided darkness
rushing innocence
all over Earth 

Shadows designed 
for our tired birth places
ghosting the new life 
upon babbling breaths  
 
And so the young are born 
New guardians 
Robed in 
Apocalypse

Text used for 2: they will rise, as birds fall:
Know they will rise
As disappearance is written  
on ancient weather 
become beast
She watches above 
as birds fall 
out of the mother sky 

March into the high courts 
of creators and destroyers
Anjali Sharma and the army 
                  Future keepers
Enter this laced arena 
burning horizons in their bellies 

The Minister surveys the gravity
how deep we may breathe
how quickly we will fall
when the Earth veins split 
and the sanctuary howls 
at its open flesh  

The weather sounds like a whisper 
in these walls that stand for justice 
Lay down a pocketful 
of bird bones
of poison oceans

Text used for 3: The Changing Wilds
They speak for the
forgotten
Their ancestral home-body
Their drowning, burning worlds
for their lands that have lost hope 
together their voices are louder
Becoming suns
Becoming rains 
Becoming rivers multiplied 
Becoming the skyward call 
of protection 

this call
Is honoured
the duty of care rewritten
A first for acknowledging
the changing wilds

Evidence now held
in palms that believe in
collapse
and might begin to
listen
Blessing the horror 
with a soft breath of courage 

Remember how
young sacred tears 
are greeting Earth 
like miracle seeds

Our Duty to Care (LIVE)(song cycle for soprano & piano trio)(2023)(Bridgette Kelsey & Solstice Trio)

Simple piece that sounded like an echo of something unheard.

Before This, Beyond That

The Echo Of Unheard Things

August 2, 2023
coop with Hauslabor  soundcloud.com/kersten-ginsberg

BRAMERUN  [coop with Hauslabor]

This is the final song in the cycle Watching the Perseids, which I have orchestrated as a memorial for the poet Peter Scupham (1933 - 2022), whose wonderful words I have set in these songs. It catches up all the threads from the previous five songs and goes on to establish an elegaic mood of remembrance.

Watching the Perseids: Remembering the Dead

I composed and played the piano,last winter and JEEM arranged this pieece for me.I met him on SoundCloud,Thanks so much!
JEEM https://soundcloud.com/phoenixz-1-299253742   Very happy collab!

Winter( collab. with JEEM)

These SoundCloud posts contain most of my work, and the series of 5 Legacy playlists in the Spotlight are all those by which I would most like to be remembered. They begin with Noche Oscura, which I wrote in 1976, and end with Broken Forms from 2021 and the opera Russian Jerusalem, completed in 2022.
Details of all my compositions, and information about their publication, can be found at my publisher's address: Ricordi London (http://www.ricordi.com/en-US/Composers/H/Hopkins-John.aspx)

Watching the Perseids: Remembering the Dead

John Hopkins

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