Out Beyond Ideas
Poet/Lyricist:
O'Shaughnessy/Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
Commissioned by:
VocalEssence and the Louis and Mary Kay Smith Foundation for the Sabathani Vintage Voices choir of Minneapolis, directed by Robert Graham and Viva Voce choir of Champlin Park High School, Minnesota, directed by Margaret Sabin
Premiere:
Vintage Voices, directed by Robert Graham and Viva Voce Choir, directed by Margaret Sabin
Level:
moderate
Text:
We are the Music Makers/Out Beyond Ideas
We Are the Music Makers
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1897
Out beyond ideas
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.
Rumi, translated by Rabindranath Tagore