Take Time
Take Time for massed orchestras and singers. Lyrics by Anna Moody. Duration 15 minutes.
World premiere on 27th September 2019 in Fairfield Halls, Croydon
Take Time is a piece designed to bring together musicians of all ages, abilities and experience, from near-beginners to professional players. It was commissioned by the London Mozart Players and Croydon Music and Arts. Take Time is dedicated to John Stephens, in thanks for his friendship and encouragement.
Anna’s lyrics for Take Time were inspired by the contemporary climate change crisis and its urgent call for change.
Programme note:
Five years ago, I was invited to conduct two of my string pieces with a vast orchestra in Chile. These enthusiastic young musicians were only part of an enormous music camp, and the thought occurred to me then how exciting it would be to write a piece for literally everyone there. The idea stuck, and when Sophie Renshaw and Julia Desbruslais approached me about writing a flexible piece for the London Mozart Players to perform with groups of children around the country, I finally had the chance to realise the dream.
The idea behind the piece was that we all seem to spend so much time on the unimportant things in life, the trivial and mundane, and don’t often really take the time to concentrate on the important things in life, the things that make us truly happy. When I invited Anna to write the lyrics, she immediately focused on the single most important topic of our age, that of the unfolding catastrophe of climate change. She wrote them during the time of the Extinction Rebellion protests in London and Greta Thunberg’s speech to the Houses of Parliament in April. In this piece, Anna expresses the frenzied rush of our lives which stops us from looking beyond ourselves and her lyrics are a call to our society to ‘take time to change’ before our time runs out.