Water Sweet by Carol Ann Weaver

Composer Carol Ann Weaver shares some background & the process behind this month's featured piece.

There are times when inner sounds can express a yet deeper level of outer soundscapes than can a microphone “recording” the natural world.  While in South Africa’s Kruger National Park for 52 days, late 2025, I recorded some 200 tracks of the natural world – birds, animals and various ambient sounds of water, wind, windmills – always amazed that this music lives because Kruger, a region the size of Wales, has been preserved for natural inhabitants.  During this time I listened to zero human-made music.  Yet during these days, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms bombarded me with their constant presence which I could not escape.  They were quiet, calming, repetitive, and (to me) almost hypnotic, as well as infuriating — why would they not leave me?  

It was too soon to know where these sounds would take me.  But now they seem to be what the wilderness was intoning as an ongoing chorale created not by me, but by the very wildness I inhabited those 52 days;  i.e., this wilderness had become a space where the outer pristine natural soundscape became an inner soundscape as the natural world sang.  When words emerged, dealing with shepherd,  pastures, danger and water sweet, I allowed the ancient text of Psalm 23 to embrace these sounds, and give them wing.  This is not music of pure glory.  A dying wildebeest calf,  a dehydrated African Wild Cat, an injured lion are part of the sound.  Danger, deprivation, decay and death are indeed the forces out of which birth, life, vibrancy, and vitality emerge.    

After several live performances of the resultant Water Sweet (SATB a cappella) in Kitchener-Waterloo in 2026, the piece is now being published by Cypress Choral Music, run by Larry Nickel in BC, with the Rocky Mountain Chamber Choir providing a heart-warming performance of the work.