Borisova-Ollas - In a World Unspoken for saxophone quartet and organ

Stockholm-based award-winning composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas was inspired in this piece by verses from The Soldier by the English poet Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940).  The first four lines read:

Down some cold field in a world unspoken

the young men are walking together, slim and tall,

and though they laugh to one another, silence is not broken;

there is no sound however clear they call.

Borisova-Ollas sees these verses as a kind of silent film, in which the figures of the past sweep before the eyes of the observers, seem to speak to their companions, shout or laugh, the watcher unable to hear the slightest hint of what they are saying.

Musically, she realises this unspoken world by making individual sounds and motifs audible, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in pairs or groups. The individual words or fragments of sentences run past each other like separate conversations, as if one might have read the lips of the figures in this apparently silent world and deciphered their meaning.