Song:
Turn, from The Book of Rounds
Lyrics by: Julie Flanders
Music by: Emil Adler
Song Learning Time Stamps:
Start of teaching: 00:03:26
Start of reprise: 00:17:37
Lyrics:
If you need a world
to belong to
Look around
You’re already home
And what you seek
You’ve already found
Turn around to me
You will see
No reason to be lonely
Notes: You can find different arrangements of this round, but here it is in its beautiful simplicity as a song you can carry on walks and in the middle of the night...learn it slowly with me, letting it sink in, and then let it sing inside you as it has for me over the past decade, connecting, settling, assuring me that I'm already home in some fundamental way. Then maybe go sing along with the Vancouver Youth Choir! Songs that help us navigate life, feel connected, remember into what can be beautiful with humans...
Songwriter Info: American Prize-winning Composer Emil Adler, Poet/Lyricist/Conceptor Julie Flanders and Vocalist/Producer Marina Belica of October Project offer a new repertoire of choral music with a message. Known to millions for the poetry and aural beauty of their recordings, The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace, conceived of and written by Flanders & Adler, has become a choral viral sensation.
Written to promote feelings of well-being, each of the 21 songs of The Book of Rounds is a fugue of positive messages set into musical rounds that strengthen and expand those messages with each repetition.
A post of the round “Turn,” performed by the Vancouver Youth Choir, the largest youth choir in Canada, to the one million followers of Daily Choirs online, resulted in an outpouring of interest from choirs across the globe. It has since been sung by thousands of singers and achieved significant acclaim.
The songs have moved beyond classrooms and concert halls to spiritual and healing communities including music therapy, hospice (The Threshold Choir), Alzheimer and dementia patients (Canada’s nationwide Voices in Motion organization) as well as in refugee camps around the world. Setting up a space of calm within the chaos, where children can have access to art, books and music, aid workers have shared The Book of Rounds at such refugee camps as Lesvos, Greece, the Sinjar district of Northern Iraq and at a camp for Ukrainian refugees in Moldova, where, in spite of the language differences, the beauty and comforting embrace of the rounds helps soothe displaced and traumatized children.
Recipient of the 2020 ACDA Genesis Prize, with Venezuelan-born composer, Carlos Cordero, Flanders’ earlier choral work, Holding Our Breath, was debuted in 2021 by Conspirare (Craig Hella Johnson) and has since been performed worldwide, including at the Kennedy Center (Eugene Rogers & EXIGENCE) and Carnegie Hall, also winning awards for young choirs across the world.
A #1 best-selling poet on Amazon, Flanders has authored four collections of poetry and originated the international October Project Annual Poetry Contest, now in its 9th year, attracting thousands of entries in conjunction with National “April is Poetry Month.”
With messages of hope, comfort, belonging and healing that resonate today with more urgency than ever before, Julie Flanders, Emil Adler and Marina Belica of October Project are on a mission to bring harmony to these dissonant times.
Says Ryan Heller, Conductor and Artistic Director of Chorus Austin, who premiered the work with close to 200 performers, “October Project has captured something that the world needs right now with The Book of Rounds. Each of the 21 rounds combines to form a composite whole that resonates with what it means to be human.”
Sharing Info: The song is free to share in oral tradition groups, but for recording and/or performing in a workshop, class, or performance, please visit https://www.octoberprojectmusic.com/the-book-of-rounds/sheet-music/the-book-of-rounds-sheet-music for permission and rates.
Links:
Contact email: octoberprojectmusic@gmail.com
Website for October Project: www.octoberprojectmusic.com
Website for The Book of Rounds: https://www.octoberprojectmusic.com/the-book-of-rounds/the-book-of-rounds-summary
Youtube: @OctoberProjectMusic
Facebook: @October Project
Instagram: @octoberproject
Spotify: @October Project
Nuts & Bolts: 2:4, major, round
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