for soprano and bass-clarinet (also Bb clarinet), texts by Daniel D’Adamo
Commissioned by the Ensemble Accroche Note, Françoise Kubler soprano & Armand Angster clarinet.

I – Never a drought like this
II – Old Boorana man
III – The singing well

The Boorana people live in the very south of Ethiopia and at the other side of the frontier with Kenya. They speak and sing the Boorana, which is part of the Cushitic branch of the large Afro-Asiatic language family.
Their wealth is their livestock and their greatest need is to be able to give them water to drink. In their extremely arid living area, they dig impressive wells in depth and complexity, both for their shapes and for the way in which the water that is extracted from the wells is managed. Their lives depend on them.
Raising water from the depths of the earth is a hard task. As vital as it is exhausting. It is only made possible by singing: voices rise from the bottom of each well, songs accompany every bucket filled with water. Repetitive and hypnotizing litanies. Magical singings spreading life along the desert.
This piece is structured in three parts. The central part is sung in Boorana, the language of Cushitic origin is the one spoken by an old man, a shepherd, who speaks of the past he has lived and which is gradually fading away…