That which you wove of lightest thread, I wear to honour stone

french horn, string quartet
2026

“no less affecting and directly communicative”
Seen and Heard International, Aug 2026

Duration 12’
Instrumentation french horn, 2 violins, viola, cello
First Performance 13 August 2026, by Ben Goldscheider (horn), Benjamin Baker and Alessandro Ruisi (violins), Sascha Bota (viola) and Jamie Walton (cello)
Commissioned by North York Moors Chamber Music Festival, the Richard Thomas Foundation and L’Auditori Barcelona

Further Performances
17.10.26 L’Auditori Barcelona, Spain; José Vicente Castelló horn, Cosmos Quartet EUROPEAN PREMIERE
TBA.07.27 JAM on the Marsh Festival, New Romley, UK; Ben Goldscheider, Heath Quartet

Charlotte has a worldwide, exclusive publishing agreement with Birdsong
Hire Materials

Commissioned by North York Moors Chamber Music Festival, the Richard Thomas Foundation and L’Auditori Barcelona, the piece is my second collaboration with the artist Caroline Burraway.

Words of Caroline Burraway, artist:

Behind a padlocked tall iron gate the unmarked graves lie silent – a forgotten hidden place – small mounds of earth cover the graves of children marked only by a stick. The fragility of human life felt so quiet, so tragic … (Forgotten Refugee Graveyard, Lesvos 2019)

In this forgotten place my silent thoughts searching to make sense of lives taken so violently … lives barely making a mark. I return in the early hours to shoot my timebased video work ‘Unchosen’, a moving still amidst the waking sounds of the countryside as the sun rises over the unmarked graves. When I return home I can’t stop thinking about the immense tragedy of it all. I want to lay something gentle, something beautiful over their graves as an act of remembrance.

This ephemeral intensely fragile display of skeleton leaves I gathered over a period of 2 years and sewn together with my hair, will over time decompose and return to the earth. It considers the relationship between art and the fragility of the world we live in. Seemingly suspended in a state of transformation, the leaves fill the space between life and death.

Much of my work responds to human experience and global events, exploring themes of displacement, conflict, memory, fragility, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Caroline’s artistic practice confronts socio-political conflicts and cultural ruptures between and within communities. Concerned with the marginalised, the displaced she has been responding to the refugee crisis since 2015. After we met in 2021, we began sharing ideas, a dialogue that has since developed into a series of collaborations.

The title, ‘That which you wove of lightest thread, I wear to honour stone’, is taken from Paul Celan’s poem Totenhemd. Like much of Celan’s poetry, the poem is complex and richly layered, a quality that resonates throughout both Caroline’s artwork and my music. Celan frequently employs the imagery of light to evoke language, spirit, or revelation, while stone suggests silence, death, the grave, and history—particularly the memory of the Holocaust.

The woven object functions as both a shroud and a prayer shawl, woven from “light” to serve as a protective garment, yet one that carries the weight of memory and of the dead—the “stone” of the title.

Like the artwork, the music is woven into a delicate, intimate, and complex web. The piece begins almost imperceptibly, “somewhere between breath and note”. Like the veins of a leaf, each musical fragment depends on the others to sustain the fragile structure. The horn is very much part of this web of sound, yet at times it sings out in haunting melodies that become focal points within the texture. The horn’s inherent call-like nature is significant: it evokes a call to arms, alluding to the wars from which people are fleeing.

The music feels deeply connected to the natural world, born from the sensuous and richly evocative inspiration of Caroline’s artwork. For me, this collaboration is profoundly important and a constant source of motivation. It allows me to channel my emotional response to political issues through artistic creation, which I find to be an immensely rich and deeply rewarding way of working. I am profoundly grateful to Caroline for her inspiration.