Wintra

ModernMedieval premiering my piece Transpiring in Princeton, NJ in April 2019. Huge thanks to ModernMedieval for their amazing performance, Aaron Hostetter for assistance with the text and for the use of his translation, and Andres Villalta for the video and recording. Wintra is a setting of excerpts from the original Anglo-Saxon texts, with modern English translations by Aaron Hostetter, which he has created as a part of the Rutgers University Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project. The text I chose for this piece was inspired by an article by Alexandra Harris that was published in The Guardian titled “Making the Weather in English Writing.” Harris writes that she “spent a summer reading Anglo-Saxon poetry and chronicles. The fascination with frost seemed to run so deep that even the language was frozen into its forms: wintercearig, winterbiter, wintergeweorþe. Where was the sun? I kept reading, waiting for the spring. It came in the lyric poems of the 13th century…”. Reading through Anglo-Saxon texts, there are many mentions of wintry terms, but no mentions of any of the other seasons. For Wintra, I have taken all of the mentions of “winters” (used as a substitute for “years”) from Beowulf, combined them with Aaron Hostetter’s translations, and organized the excerpts by the number of winters. Writing this piece, I wanted to capture the stillness and intimate sounds of a frozen landscape, and a cyclical sense of time as the winters pass.