Beatrice Ferreira: "Glossolalia (‘speaking in tongues’) is a soliloquy for soprano and mixed ensemble that considers the inner experience of the act of singing. The piece’s text comes from extracts of a personal interview with McKenzie Warriner that we made together during the Britten Pears Young Artist workshop in November 2022. I transcribed McKenzie’s speaking voice using SPEAR software. These transcribed fragments form the vocal material of glossolalia, while the orchestra improvises fragments of her melodies in a stream of transforming flow. The final seven lines of text come from Sermon No.3272: ‘How to Become Full of Joy’, delivered by C.H. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, on 17 September, 1865.
The title glossolalia refers to the spontaneous flow of syllables and other speech-like sounds, a phenomenon known in Pentecostal communities as ‘speaking in tongues’. Although certain features of a glossolalia may resemble aspects of a speaker’s native language, it contains no syntax or sem
