I've always loved when songs about happiness are set in a minor key—think Nina Simone singing “Feeling Good”—and the harmonic language acknowledges that we can't have joy without recognizing its opposite.

 

Threads of Joy has similar undertones, and this setting of Laura Foley's text by the same name is not just an exultation of happiness. Rather, it recognizes how we emerge from darkness and pain back into light, and the music captures this duality in ever-shifting, prismatic harmonies.

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Threads of Joy was commissioned by the Hopkins High School Concert Choir (Philip Brown, conductor). This score is published in Hal Leonard's Mark Foster Series and available for purchase here.

 

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THREADS OF JOY

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I have noticed joy

how it threads below

the darkness.

Have you seen it too?

And have you heard it,

how it speaks
the unspeakable,

the bliss?

A kind of silence, a light

beneath pain.

Have you noticed?

It rises like fingers

and then—look!
it presses through.

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—Laura Foley
© 2006, from Syringa.