This work is due to be premiered as a part of the Halifax Minster’s Summer Festival in June 2026.

Drawing upon extracts spanning fifteen years of Anne Lister’s diaries, this cycle explores themes of identity, self-determination, solitude and landscape through three contrasting unaccompanied choral reflections. The texts reveal not only the intellectual sharpness and emotional intensity of one of Halifax’s most remarkable historical figures, but also the striking immediacy and modernity of her voice.

The opening movement, I Am Resolved, sets a diary entry from 1819 in which Lister reflects upon preserving a private record of her thoughts and experiences. Its broad and assured musical language reflects the determination and clarity of the text. By contrast, Moi Seule turns inward, setting a quotation from Rousseau’s Confessions copied into Lister’s diary in 1823. Passionate and emotionally charged, it forms the emotional centre of the cycle. The final movement, Such a Place, takes its text from a later diary entry describing the Yorkshire landscape, bringing the work to a calmer and more reflective conclusion.

Rather than attempting historical portraiture, the work seeks simply to allow Anne Lister’s words to speak again in a contemporary musical voice: intelligent, searching and profoundly individual.