Composition for SSAA choir, piano four hands, violin, crotales, and tom-toms. Composed for the Texas Woman's University Concert Choir's performance at the 2025 American Choral Directors Association Conference in Dallas, TX.
 
Duration: Approximately 4'40"
 
Please contact me for individual instrumental parts and choir/piano only score.
 
You Shall Know sets excerpts of the farewell address from Kahlil Gibran’s twentieth-century masterpiece The Prophet.
 
The first portion of the composition presents a turbulent search for a meaning beyond our material reality. The music shifts following the promise of “you shall see and you shall hear” as the restless ascending chord progression reverses upon itself and gradually builds with each repetition of the stepwise descent to the tonic. In the end, it is through blessing both the light and the darkness - the knowable and the unknowable - that we may truly know who we are and what our place is in this world.
 

Text by Kahlil Gibran from "The Prophet"
 
You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields.
That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.
It is not a thing that crawls into the sun for warmth or digs holes into darkness for safety,
But a thing free, a spirit that envelops the earth and moves in the ether.
 
Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else,
And if you could hear the whispering of the dream  you would hear no other sound.
But you do not see, nor do you hear, and it is well.
 
The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it,
And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it. And you shall see.
And you shall hear.
 
Yet you shall not deplore having known blindness, nor regret having been deaf.
For in that day you shall know the hidden purposes in all things,
And you shall bless darkness as you would bless light.