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Mixed Choir
Treble Choir

Girl Hours (2019)

for SATB or SSSAAA choir, a cappella

Text: Sofia Samatar (b. 1971)
Duration: 5 minutes
Difficulty: 3/4

Commissioned by The Fourth Choir (London, UK) and dedicated with deepest appreciation to David Sturgeon, a benefactor of the choir. SATB version first performed by The Fourth Choir (Dominic Ellis-Peckham, dir.) in October 2019.

Girl Hours is based on the life of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an influential American astronomer who discovered a way to measure the distances of stars in the early twentieth century. Alongside other women, Leavitt was employed at the Harvard College Conservatory as a human computer, made to study photographs and make calculations, rather than operating the telescopes. As a result, the director of the conservatory measured the difficulty of their projects in ‘girl hours’. Samatar’s elegant poetry turns this belittling phrase into a statement of power and a testament to the important intellectual labour of these women. My music imagines Leavitt working late into the night, studying her photographic plates and seeing instead the immensity of the universe stretching before her.

Click here to see the complete score.

The audio below is a commercial recording released in 2023 by Luminous Voices.

Full Text

Twelve o'clock.
My husband and children asleep.

To chart one more star, to go on working:
this is a way of keeping faith.

Draw me a map.
Show me how to read music.
Teach me to rise without standing,
to hold the galaxy's calipers
with the earth at one gleaming tip,
to live vastly and with precision,
to travel
where distance is no longer measured in miles but in lifetimes,
in epochs, in breaths, in light years, in girl hours.

© Sofia Samatar, 2011. Used with permission.