Be Still My Soul

Be Still, My Soul is a work for voice, violin, and piano built around the familiar hymn and the musical material associated with Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia. Rather than treating the source as the basis for a conventional arrangement, the piece uses it as inherited material—something recognizable that can be fragmented, extended, surrounded, and heard from a different perspective.

The hymn emerges within an independently conceived musical landscape, with the violin and piano functioning as more than accompaniment. At times they anticipate or reflect the familiar melody; elsewhere they pull away from it, creating a larger expressive space around the voice. Recognition becomes part of the experience: a known tune appears gradually within music that is otherwise its own.

The result is both a response to and a transformation of the original material. Be Still, My Soul is concerned less with restating a familiar hymn than with what can happen when familiar music is remembered, reconsidered, and allowed to speak differently.