Julie Dolphin
Julie Dolphin of Purchase, N.Y., is a composer-vocalist in a variety of idioms whose commissioned works have been performed at Carnegie Hall and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and whose music is widely recognized for creating an experience of oneness underlying the diversity of life. She is also a member of the renowned Waverly Consort, where she has contributed two arrangements of traditional folksongs and two original compositions set to contemporary poetry, I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.
Her music is known for its diversity, ranging from lively syncopation suggesting a rhythmic, jazz-like dance to allusions to natural sounds to illustrate philosophical reflections.
FROM THE COMPOSER
"Woods: A Prose Sonnet"
Ms. Dolphin’s composition articulates an “aural forest” that celebrates the universal sum of love that rejoices in the beauty of life’s diversity as an expression of its inherent and coherent unity.
We share in a universal sum of love, which is blind to our individual differences, and which I feel most strongly in nature. Japanese spirituality knows this as kokoro, the divine universal heart of nature. Emerson’s transcendental Woods: A Prose Sonnet speaks to me of being surrounded by an unconditionally accepting kokoro, which judges no one and offers peace to all. In Woods, I wanted to create an aural forest, filled with the noisy ruckus of life, yet underlain with, and mindful of, the absence of sound, which expresses everything, and is the gift I find when hiking. This piece was mostly composed while I went walking and tried to listen for the voice of kokoro. If I had my druthers, I’d prefer to say only: I went out into the woods, in whose lively midst silence reigns. -Julie Dolphin
