Srikijkarn Gloria Archives - Behind the Music

Image by falco from Pixabay; do you recognize what story is being portrayed in this sculpture and how it relates to the concept of mercy?

The choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is privileged to include a composer, Gloria Srikijkarn, whose works we have performed at several concerts. For our October 2022 concert Songs of Thanksgiving we have a section titled “The Valley of the Shadow” that includes her setting of “Kyrie.” She says that she wrote this moving and beautiful piece “at a very dark time in my life.”

The simple text comes from the service of the Roman Catholic Mass but is often, as here, used as a stand-alone piece. It’s always helpful, though, no matter how separate from the original a version is, to look at how it was used in the first place. So if you were to attend an actual service of the Mass you’d participate in singing the text right after the priest or minister had addressed the congregation by saying,

It’s an unusual concert at which there will be in attendance two composers of the music being performed. It’s even more unusual to have one of those composers actually singing in the choir. (We’re also singing an arrangement by a member of the choir; I’m going to try to get to that piece in a later post.) We’ve been privileged in the past to sing Gloria Srikijkarn’s rousing setting of Psalm 100; now we get to present her 2019 composition using lyrics from “Solitude” by the mid-19th-century American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Srikijkarn is a long-time member of the Cherry Creek Chorale and at present serves as the chair of our artistic committee.

I asked the composer about her creative process with this song, and she told me that when she was growing up her father had a book of poetry containing “Solitude.” (The poem has as an alternate title “The Way of the World.” Don’t know why.) As an adult Srikijkarn remembered the poem and decided to set it to music, but when she went back and read the whole thing she realized that it was much darker than she’d thought. Her first draft ended up being unusable, and she used just half of the lines in her finished piece. Here they are: