for soprano, choir, picc, alto fl, ob, 2 bass cl, 3 perc [23′] 2017.

Commissioned by Continuum with funds from the Ontario Arts Council
Premiere: June 3, 2017 at Evergreen Brick Works, as part of FOUR LANDS, co-produced by Continuum Contemporary Music & Jumblies Theatre

“Everything stays the same,
Everything is yet to be discovered.”

Quarry excavates layers of memory and place through song and sound. The lyrics intertwine words from community members across Canada into a dreamscape that hovers between the present, the past and the future. What do we discover if we dig deep — beneath the ground where we stand, back into the bedrock of time, below the tangle of our everyday thoughts?

Solo mezzo with mixed chorus [15’] 2015.
Premiere: Laura Swankey & The Burble Choir with conductor Christine Duncan, Singing River, Pan Am Path, Lower Don Trail, Toronto, July 4-5, 2015.
Text: Anna Chatterton

Burble gives voice to the Wonscotonach/Don River, one of Canada’s most polluted rivers.

My curves are straight

My mouth is a drain

Spewing grease and trash

Cars roar and ignore me

I am deaf from the din…

Mixed voices [12’] 2015.

Premiere: Alex Samaras & GREX, Singing River, Pan Am Path, Lower Don Trail, Toronto, July 5, 2015.
Text: Nicholas Power

walking at night in the woods

between my childhood home and the river

fully awake and wondering

in a dream both strange and familiar

particular trees reach out like lovers…

Available on the CD Juliet Palmer: rivers

SATB [4’] 2015.
Commissioner: Victoria College, University of Toronto
Premiere: The choirs of Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges, Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto, October 14, 2015.
Text: Margaret Avison (excerpted from Stone’s Secret, Sunblue, Lancelot Press, 1978)

Otter-smooth boulder

lies under rolling

black river-water

stilled among frozen

hills and the still unbreathed

blizzards aloft;

silently, icily, is probed

stone’s secret.

Word has arrived that

peace will brim up, will come

“like a river and the

glory…like a flowing stream.”

So.

Some of all people will

wondering wait

until this very stone

utters.

children’s chorus SATB [8′] 2010.

Commissioner: Viva Youth Singers
Funder: Viva Youth Singers
Premiere:  Viva Youth Singers, Trinity-St.Pauls, Toronto, May 16, 2010.
Text: Dennis Lee

Program note:

These two songs for children’s chorus draw on the beloved Canadian poet Dennis Lee’s works for children — Garbage Delight — and adults — Yesno, creating a world which acknowledges distance and pessimism, but also hope and possibility.

The Moon (from Garbage Delight, 1977)

“I see the moon and the moon sees me

And nobody sees as secretly…”

Dopey (from Yesno, 2007)

“…mind to the

grindstone, ear to the plough.

Hi-

Hoein along with a song:

What home but here?  Whose grubby hands but ours?”

unaccompanied chorus SSAATTBB [5′] 2005.

Commissioner: Soundstreams Canada
Premiere: Tafelmusik, Soundstreams Canada’s New Voices Choral Workshop, Trinity-St. Pauls, Toronto, January 22, 2005.
Text: Dennis Lee
Program note:

gone is based on one of the fifty-one poems which make up Dennis Lee’s UN (Anansi Press, 2003).