The World Tree (2025)

SSAATTBB (+ alto solo in mvt. V)
(text: Robert Macfarlane – in English)
65 min.

1. Glacial Maximum (6’)
2. Wildwood (12’)
3. Pollen Polyphony (4’30”)
4. Song of the Axe (5’)
5. Lament of the Legionary’s Wife (5”)
6. Night of the Big Wind (5’)
7. Axis Mundi (8’)
8. Heartwood (5’)
9. Requiem (6’30”)
10. The Word for World Is Forest (7’)

The World Tree began as an unformed desire to write a large-scale a cappella choral work to an original English text, one with an element of the sacred—if not specifically the religious—underlying it. As nature has always been at the heart of my work, I wanted the words to come from someone whose way of seeing the natural world was similar to my own. I had long followed the work of the British writer Robert Macfarlane, in whose poetic, often elegiac, but ultimately unsentimental view of nature I perceived clear parallels with my own thoughts. The human experience of nature—how we imagine with and are challenged by the natural world—is central to both our work. In 2019 I plucked up my courage and contacted him out of the blue, asking if he would be interested in collaborating. To my great surprise, he agreed almost immediately.

However, the global events of the following year intervened, and the project lay dormant for several years. In 2023, the stars aligned once again for the piece to be realized, not long after the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in England, an act of such mindless vandalism that it created shockwaves around the world. It occurred to me that this iconic tree—this being—deserved a requiem, to commemorate both its intrinsic significance and its emotional resonance to those who had known and loved it. I reapproached Robert with the idea, and from his fertile imagination sprang the idea for the work presented tonight.

At the centre of many cosmogonies grows a ‘World Tree’: a living axis around which the planet turns—a tree so colossal that it reaches between dominions, joining the celestial heavens (where its canopy flourishes), the terrestrial realm (its trunk and lower branches) and the underworld (its deep-delving roots). Yoruba, Finnish, Haitian, Mesoamerican, Japanese, Siberian, Norse, Welsh, Indian, Babylonian and Chinese mythologies all have versions of a world tree or axis mundi. It goes by many names and many species, from Yggdrasil the ash (Norse) to Ashvatta the fig (Hindu) and the sacred Cedar of Lebanon (Babylonian-Assyrian). For a few weeks after its felling, the Hadrian’s Wall Sycamore became a kind of ‘World Tree’, drawing, condensing and connecting millions of human responses to and imaginings of what might be called ‘arboreality’.

Although we began with the idea of a requiem, the work that subsequently grew and branched from that root is more of an extended song cycle than a symphonic or dramatic stage work. In Robert’s hands, the narrative grew from a simple commemoration of the loss of the Sycamore Gap Tree to a deep-time meditation on the eons and events that led to the tree growing in that spot. It pulls the temporal frame far, far back, to offer a vision of trees and forests in Northern Europe since the retreat of the great ice-sheets at the end of the last glaciation, around 12,000 years ago—right at the dawn of the Holocene epoch. Viewed in deep time, things come alive that have seemed inert: ice breathes, rock has tides—and forests migrate; restlessly ebbing and flowing across landscapes, forming wildwood kingdoms, then thinning almost to absence in the face of climatic changes or human intervention. In this way, the Sycamore Gap Tree is contextualized as representative of all trees and forests lost to time and human action over ages.

Choral music, by nature of its form, asks complex questions of the individual’s relationship to the collective, as solo utterance emerges from and is subsumed into shared voicings. Over the past quarter-century, forest ecologists have come to understand that apparently ‘single’ trees and plants are in fact invisibly connected to one another by vastly intricate fungal networks known as ‘mycelia’. The World Tree may be thought of as a mycelial work: at once enacting and incanting some of the countless relationships—imaginative, cultural, ecological, historical—by means of which the long life of the Sycamore Gap Tree, and the acute event of its felling, are conjoined across time and space with other beings, other voices and other forces. Always, here, the fate of humans and the fate of trees are shown to grow together.

The libretto fuses elements of speculative fiction, lyric poetry, archival collage, found voices, dream-visions and evocations of more-than-human presence and agency. This is a work in which pollen is a form of memory, glaciers shape fate and make weather, and trees and forests become dynamic historical actors. If the violence and destruction humanity inflict on nature is present as a main theme in both text and music, this feeling of loss is counterbalanced by a more optimistic outlook. Indeed, from the beginning we both wanted the work, while cautioning about the human relationship with nature, to embody a hope for a better, greener future, one in which humanity evolves from a role of exploitation to one of enlightened, responsible reciprocity with the natural world and its countless more-than-human lives and forces. This undercurrent of quiet hope runs throughout the work and shines through in the end.

Another central theme is that of awe in the face of the immensity and immanence of the natural world. A core question and problem for both of us during the creative process was how to express this sense of awe without reducing its object in the telling. What words can I use, what notes can I sound that won’t strip meaning, power and significance from this thing, this huge suchness, and leave it lesser for the description? However, it is that very human capacity for wonder when confronted with the inexpressible complexity of nature, and the impulse to tell of it, that creates a bond between us and the natural world, that gives us a stake in its flourishing. If there is an overarching theme to The World Tree, it is this awe that nature engenders in us, if we are alert and open to it. It shapes us, changes us, and in its turn changes how we shape the world around us.

By means of lyric and music, a vast, dynamic drama here springs to life in the mind’s ear of the listener: moving from deep human and sylvan pasts, up to and through our troubled present—and on into a precarious Anthropocene future, in which shoots of hope nevertheless emerge, just as the stump of the Sycamore Gap Tree re-coppices itself. This is a salutary project for an age increasingly shattered by its failure to take the long view. Ambitious, experimental and unsentimental, The World Tree rings and sings with both wonder and strangeness.

We are deeply grateful to the Helsinki Chamber Choir for this opportunity, and to the foundations that made possible the writing, composition, performance and recording of The World Tree: the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Fund, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Madetoja Foundation.

Matthew Whittall and Robert Macfarlane