Shielding Songs by Jessica Curry

Shielding Songs is my first album in five years and is probably the most personal music I've ever made. It explores themes of vulnerability, tenderness, tolerance, forgiveness, loss and love.

Shielding Songs - written for choir - is a paean to the human spirit and asks profound questions about the responsibilities we bear to one another. It grew out of the experience of losing family and being clinically vulnerable during the pandemic, but its themes are wider than this. What began as a reaction to the grief and shock of feeling cast aside by society has turned into a clarion call for togetherness and the need to offer our help, our love and our compassion to the vulnerable. Fundamentally, the album is about the responsibility we all have to shield one another.

Performed by wonderful long-term collaborators, London Voices, the album features world premieres, new arrangements of music from games and settings of Home by Warsan Shire (the British poet championed by Beyoncé) and my collaboration with the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

It also includes tracks from my 2011 anti-war Requiem, Perpetual Light, recorded for the very first time, and a brand-new piece, Rest With Your Dream, a beautiful and lyrical response to the timeless Pablo Neruda poem

Jessica Curry is a composer for games.

jessicacurry.co.uk