Lisa Bielawa: Spinning Flax SSSAAA

The collaged texts of Spinning Flax are “spun” together from a broad historical range of source material – court records, church and town records, neurological case histories, Medieval and Renaissance histories – which provide recorded utterances of young girls aged 12–20 in some state of visionary transcendence. The texture of this piece is contrapuntal and plays with contrasting levels of density, reflecting both the individuality of the young woman's voice in history and the plurality of her suffering. For treble voices in six parts (SSSAAA) a cappella.