From Steve Reich to Paul Celan, Hebrew to Arabic, and across music, poetry and visual arts, this day curated by writer and artist Edmund de Waal invites many voices into our shared spaces, echoing lament and joy, solitude and community, in a tapestry of cultures and histories spreading throughout the Centre.

Alongside a selection of Edmund de Waal’s artwork, the day will include free and ticketed activities and pop-up performances, including the dynamic Colin Currie Group performing Steve Reich’s Tehillim, followed by Aurora Orchestra performing Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with the BBC Singers.

Here’s what Edmund himself says about the reason he wanted to work with the Cultural Programme to create this Day of Psalms:

“When I had the idea of threading a day through some of the spaces of the Schwarzman Centre, I thought of how the psalms work as songs of exile from the city and have become powerful expressions of loss and diaspora. The psalms are songs that move between the singular and the plural, the solitary voice and the tribal, from anger to despair and lament to joy: ‘By the rivers of Babylon I sat down and wept as I remembered…’ to ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever’. The Schwarzman Centre will be filled with people from different communities inhabiting and sharing their own cultures of the psalms.

“This is personal. I grew up in cathedrals, first Lincoln and then Canterbury, as part of a clergy family. I heard the psalms as part of the day-to-day rhythm of the services: they were embedded in Matins in the morning and Evensong at the end of the afternoon, the echoes of the great monastic series of Seven Offices that spanned the day and the night before the Reformation. My brothers and I used to borrow a key at night and explore the cathedral, the floodlights bringing strange itinerant shadows into the building. One memorable night forty years ago we heard the monks from the Abbey of Bec in Normandy sing the psalms in Canterbury Cathedral for the first time in five hundred years.

“The psalms are songs of exile — sung, recited, remembered, prayed, danced and translated across centuries and across cultures. They are central to all three of the Abrahamic religions, have inspired music, poetry, sacred art, dance. This is a day that celebrates this plurality, one history reaching out to another, a palimpsest of voices.”