To make a prairie - by Alison West

Submitted by: Alison W.

To make a prairie is about the warm, vivid places to which our imaginations can take us when we can’t physically travel anywhere. It’s a setting of no less than three poems about bees, by the poet Emily Dickinson, a mistress of the imagined, and a person who lived most of her life in a self-imposed lockdown. I challenged myself to write 3 tunes which were capable, in part at least, of overlaying each other without turning into an incomprehensible mush – my attempt to express the lushness and abundance of the landscapes which the bees work so hard to create. Because I was in lockdown, I sang all of the parts myself.