This new orchestral song cycle for soprano and orchestra is built around an intertextual selection of poetic texts which, though separated by centuries and geography, seem to speak to us with a single voice. The cycle is conceived as a series of VISITACION[e]S (visitaciones/visitacions, Spanish and Catalan for “visitations”)—a term that refers to the experience of receiving in dreams the presence of a departed loved one. This idea, found in many cultural traditions, is expressed by the Chinese concept of tuo meng (the appearance of the dead in the dreams of the living) and the Arabic notion of ru’ya (a prophetic or revelatory dream that transcends time).

The texts chosen for the cycle—from Tang dynasty China to medieval Persia and Al-Andalus, from the courts of the early troubadours to the voice of contemporary Catalan poet Joan Margarit— present themselves before us with an uncanny emotional continuity. They are joined to create this meta-poem not because of a historical argument but because of their sensibility: their direct but transcendent tone, their tenderness toward what has been lost, and a profound meditation on absence, time, and memory.

Yet VISITACION[e]S is not a traditional lament, nor a threnody sung by the living to mourn those who have departed. Instead, it chooses to invert that perspective. Here, the voice belongs to those who have crossed to the other side. They return and appear to us in our dreams not to be mourned, but to express their longing: for our gestures, our small rituals, objects, spaces and silences. In this liminal space between life and death, the roles are reversed: it is they who sing their yearning for the fragility of our days. In a kind of reverse elegy, in these visitations we receive their voice —not as echo, but as presence.