Staniland: Dark Star Requiem

Staniland: Dark Star Requiem
Striking, beautiful, and wonderfully weird… The score is percussive, dissonant yet lyrical and evocative; very powerful and haunting.
La Scena Musicale

Staniland has utilized the modern orchestra and the contemporary media to produce a work of vital dramaturgy and lasting, thought-provoking power.

The Classical Music Guide

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2017 JUNO NOMINATIONS

– Classical Composition of the Year
– Classical Album of the Year: Vocal or Choral

Dark Star Requiem is at once intended to be challenging and joyous, complex and beautiful. A sequence of 19 poems charting a short history of HIV AIDS unfolds over the course of 14 musical movements. The poems vary stylistically from linked haikus, to ghazals, to praise poems and back to free verse. The musical movements are unified through a haunting melody and driving rhythm derived from the numbers attributed to HIV-1 and HIV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses: 00.061.1.06.009. and 00.061.1.06.010. In musical terms these numbers are interpreted in both melody and rhythm.