Conceived as a musical response to a sculpture and scored for  unaccompanied children’s choir, Daedalus was commissioned by  Little Warsaw Autumn for the Conquest of Music Junior Choir  and its conductor, Anna Waligóra-Tarnowska.

The work’s central motif is the wind, whose soughing speech  sounds form the language of an unknown land. To that end,  I devised an imaginary language whose cries invoke the wind  and storm, the moon mirrored in water, the whisper of glowfern  leaves, the heartbeat of longing, and the calls of a wanderer.

The compositional technique, based on graphic notation, draws  on How Easy It Is! A New Approach to Teaching Part-Singing,  the book I coauthored with Professor Ewa Marchwicka and  which Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne published in 1994. The sculpture itself, made up of transparent glass panels, is here  “made music” through an intricate canon of shifting structures  unfolding across three vocal groups.

Edward Sielicki