Sappho Fragments

Coming soon! Catch the world premiere conducted by Jacob Carroll:

4:00 PM, November 22, 2026 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, MI.

For more information, see the Ann Arbor Grail Singers Website.

SSAA choir

Duration: 6'

Four movements

Language: English

Text by Sappho

Commissioned by the Jacob Carroll and the Ann Arbor Grail Singers

This piece is under exclusivity until 2028

I. Just now the golden-sandaled Dawn has called

II. Love has the splendor and beauty of the Sun

III. With my two arms, I do not aspire to touch the Sky

IV. The Stars around the white Moon lose their beauty as she, almost full, illumines all the Earth with silver

Program Note: Sappho, the legendary Greek poet lived around 2,400 years ago on the island of Lesbos just west of modern day Turkey. Many of her poems have survived the millennia, but many more have been lost completely, or remain only as isolated fragments of verse. This piece sets four of those single-line fragments, connected by their references to the sky and things that appear in it. The Ancient Greeks saw the divine personified in a very concrete way in the natural world around them, and relatively detached from the many mythological depictions of them that survive today, which the Greeks did not consider to be literal truth. Within that religious worldview, Sappho would have understood the Dawn, the Sun, and the Moon to be the titan siblings Eos, Helios, and Selene, the Sky itself to be Zeus, the king of Olympus, and Love to be Aphrodite, to whom many of her other poems are addressed. In setting her words, I have tried to preserve the reverence Sappho would have felt towards these figures. This piece also invites you to remember that these lines are only partial remnants of the poems, and each movement contains wordless sections meant to represent the words that have been lost to time.

Composers can earn royalties from performances of their work, but we need the concert programs to prove the performances happened. If you perform one of my pieces, please submit the program here.

Submit Program

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse