Music Unlimited IV: “Sailors’ Hymn: Mare Liberum Wawa” (水手海洋之歌)

Included in “Chinese Choral Music Anthology: Music Unlimited IV.”

About the Work

“Sailors’ Hymn: Mare Liberum Wawa” is a work for 36-voice mixed choir and objects, lasting about 11 minutes.

The ocean was once the world’s highway. For millennia, the seas carried people, goods, herbs, tea and coffee, and spread ideas, religions and languages. Today the ocean is seen more as a line that divides nations and people from one another. The text of “Sailors’ Hymn” is taken from “Mare Liberum” (The Free Sea), first published in 1609 by the Dutch jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583–1645).

“Sailors’ Hymn” uses tone painting to create a picture in sound and language. With solemn Latin legal articles as its backbone, it interweaves contrasting traditional children’s songs of the Tao people, conveying the contrast between the vast world of the ocean and the maritime culture of Orchid Island (Lanyu), a remote island of Taiwan, while sounds made with objects depict the sea, the waves, the distant shore, the wind and more. “Sailors’ Hymn” was written specifically for the 36-voice mixed choir of the Taipei Chamber Singers, whose upper and middle registers are bright and clear and whose leading voices are exceptionally strong. The finely divided mixed voice parts and the sounds of physical objects open up rich possibilities for creating a refined soundscape: the sea, the waves, the wind on the shore and the life around the sea, as well as the relationship between the sea and people.