From the recording Threaded Sky
Grammy winner Augusta Read Thomas was born in New York. At age 23 she became the youngest woman recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Thomas has held Professorships at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Eastman University, and was appointed Composer in Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chair of the Board of the American Music Center, and named one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her composition Astral Canticle. “... All art that I cherish has an element of love and recklessness and desperation. I like music that is alive and jumps off the page and out of the instrument as if something big is at stake.”
Rumi Settings was commissioned in 2001 by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and premiered by Ani Kavafian, violin, and Ida Kavafian, viola in 2002. The music was inspired by the 900 year old texts written by the Persian poet Rumi.
III .
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spin drift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see.