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„Each day of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, we are confronted by statistical summaries of the progress of the virus in our communities: nations present official figures; studies suggest the unseen scale of transmission, sickness, death, and wider impact; models demonstrate how things might be in the near future, or might have been had different approaches been taken in the past. Behind these clinically analytical announcements and their apparent abstraction from our lived experience are the innumerable yet numbered lives lost or left in tatters, an unending landscape of broken dreams.
Written for Calmus’ MOSAIK 2020 project, ‘all our numbered lives’ draws its inspiration from the tension between the coldly statistical and economic terms through which COVID-19 is reported at a national or international level and the deeply human sorrows that are the true context of those words. It sets the language of statistical reporting, reduced over the last several months to the level of banal ritual through endless repetition and representation, as the backdrop to the first prayerful words of an older rite, the Mass for the Dead. The piece can be performed in a number of configurations to suit context and mood, and is, for the composer at least, expressive of a range of the emotions that have pervaded the pandemic, including anxiety, futility, frustration, anger, sorrow, and, perhaps most importantly, hope.“ Andrew Cusworth
Biografie
Andrew Cusworth is a composer and academic. He was raised in Pembrokeshire, Wales, studied at the University of Cambridge and The Open University, and has been based at the University of Oxford since 2018. He has a wide range of practical and academic interests, and a particular passion for choral music, whether writing, conducting, singing, or listening to it.
twitter: @andrewcusworth
facebook: @adjcusworth