The Memory Case
for choir SSA and string orchestra (2009)
duration: 5’
text by Ross Baglin
GRT • 149
score available soon
from
Australian Music
Centre
program note
Ötzi the Iceman is the name
given to a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about
3300 BC (53 centuries ago). The mummy was found in 1991 in
the Ötztal Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy.
He is Europe's oldest natural human mummy, and has offered
an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age)
Europeans.
text
He is the stopped clock time
had time to save,
To show us what we were ; his luxury grave
Of shallow glass and cubed museum light
Showcases, in charades of ice, the flight
That ended long ago below the glare
Of glassy cities spun from winter air
Since time became stone
And millennia crossed
Through wafer of bone
And finger of frost
He has lain in the same
Suspension of snow
Awaiting a pane
Of light-bearing blue
Five thousand years ago he saw the last
Of broken sky through curling snow, and passed
Into the locked floods surging overhead ;
Now, as our fires steam away his gods,
He tells, in his unmoving hands, the rate
A stopped clock estimates our carbon dates.