For Americans, I imagine, Moby-Dick is rather like A tale of two cities or Middlemarch for us Brits – a Great Book we are supposed to have read at school or university and which we ploughed through dutifully when we were too young and callow to appreciate it. Such a book should always be re-read after twenty years of adult life. But for me it was different: I first read Moby-Dick in my sixties, and was transfixed by its originality and power.

As I understand it, the whale represents the power of Nature, or Death, or Ahab’s guilt – or almost anything which lies outside man’s understanding and control; and Ahab is the personification of human will, with all its flaws. This is already powerful enough; but what struck me was the poetic language of the novel, and Melville’s bold disregard of convention. Moby Dick is as revolutionary as Sternes’ Tristram Shandy – even as James Joyce, who seems to have imitated Melville in the play-script sections of the Night-town sequence in Ulysses. If this is the First Great American Novel, it’s hard to beat.

As a composer of more than fifty choral works (and also as a non-religious person) I am continually seeking or writing words which explore the mysteries of life and death. The words for this piece are taken from chapters 111, 114 and 132 of Moby-Dick. One of the beauties of the novel is the Shakespearian complexity of its characters. Ahab may be obsessed with revenge and slaughter, to the point of sending himself and his crew to the bottom; but he is all the more interesting because he is aware of his own disability and has an intensely contemplative side.  It is this side which we hear (I hope) in Our orphan souls: Ahab facing up to and reflecting upon death and eternity.

Ahab’s part is sung by a bass-baritone, supported by mixed-voice choir, solo alto sax, percussion (vibraphone and a few unpitched metal instruments such as cymbals & tam-tam) and solo double-bass. The melodic and harmonic sound-world is built from shifting and interlocking whole-tone scales – with the benefit of hindsight, these seem like waves which constantly shift and overlay each other.

Giles Swayne 2025

Our orphan souls

CHOIR:    It was a clear, steel-blue day.

The firmaments of air and sea

Were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure;

The pensive air was pure and soft,

And the sea heaved with strong, lingering swells.

AHAB:    Would to God these blessed calms would last!

But the mingled, mingling threads of life

Are woven by warp and woof:

Calms crossed by storms; a storm for every calm.

CHOIR:    Hither and thither, on high,

Glided the snow-white wings of birds.

But to and fro in the deeps,

Far down in the bottomless blue,

Rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks –

The murderous thinkings of the sea.

AHAB:    In what rapt ether sails the world,

Of which the weariest will never weary?

Where lies the final harbour,

Whence we unmoor no more?

CHOIR:    Over these sea-pastures the waves rise and fall,

And ebb and flow unceasingly.

AHAB:    Where is the foundling’s father hidden?

CHOIR:    Millions of shades and shadows lie dreaming,

Tossing like slumberers in their beds.

AHAB:    Our souls are like those orphans

Whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them.

CHOIR: Drowned dreams,

Lives and souls . . .

AHAB:    The secret of our paternity lies in their grave,

And we must there to learn it.

CHOIR:    Our orphan souls . . .