In early September 2015, the wife and two children of a Syrian Kurdish family were drowned while attempting to cross from Bodrum in Turkey to the Greek island of Kos, in an inadequate boat provided by people-smugglers. Photographs of the dead body of a three-year-old boy face-down on a beach aroused international outcry for a time - and then, of course, most people forgot about it.

Bodrum Beach was commissioned by Stile Antico Foundation with support from the RVW Trust and Arts Council England. It is scored for mixed voices with an obbligato part for the Arab plucked-string instrument the oud - ancestor of the European lute. The poem (by me) takes as its starting-point Matthew Arnold's 1851 sonnet Dover Beach. Its prevailing image is one of tranquil beauty co-existing with cruelty, violence and death - in today's context, the close proximity of a popular tourist resort to senseless human suffering. My poem uses the first two lines of Arnold's famous sonnet, and returns to it briefly at the end. It is interwoven with the Latin words of the Tenebrae motet O vos omnes.

I hope the music speaks for itself.

Giles Swayne, 2019