Where Are My Unnumbered Days?

Score for choir only
Score with piano reduction
If you are performing this piece, please make a donation to one of the suggested causes or take a collection at your concert.

The recording from the world premiere of “Where Are My Unnumbered Days?” is now available! Thank you to the Wicker Park Singers of Chicago and artistic director Mark Tomasino, who premiered the piece. You can hear it below:

This piece was selected by Wicker Park Singers of Chicago in their call for scores, and premiered in Chicago on 12th and 13th April 2019: it also won the Murau International Music Festival Call for Works, and was performed in Murau, Austria, on 26th and 27th April 2019. The UK premiere took place at a Come and Sing event in London on 10th August 2019, which raised over £350 for Refugee Action, and it has also been performed in November 2019 by Harlequin Chamber Choir and Amy Bebbington.

This was also performed by Seattle Pro Musica in their concerts “The Way Home” on 21st and 22nd May 2022, along with “The Wall”. Click here to watch an excerpt of “Where Are My Unnumbered Days?” from their concert.

The score is free with the understanding that it should be used to raise funds or political awareness for refugees and immigrants. For example, you could take a collection in aid of a refugee charity at the concert. Here is a list of causes you could support.

For moderate to advanced SATB choir with some divisi (could be done with 2 people per part, would work better with 4 or more). The piece includes several key changes. If you’d like to make a donation to charity for the use of this piece, please click here.

Score for choir only
Score with piano reduction
MIDI demo tracks for each part are available on request.

The words are by Mohamed Assaf, a Syrian refugee who now lives in England, and were written soon after his arrival in England at the age of 12. They are also published in England: Poems from a School (published by Picador; edited by Kate Clanchy, Mohamed’s teacher). Thank you to Kate and Mohamed for giving me permission to use this heartbreaking text.

Once, I lived in a beautiful town;
Once, I owned a beautiful house,
with a grand garden full of flowers,
and I was prince of it all. Once,
I lived in a house with a name;
And now, I am just a number.

Nations talked to nations
and robbed me of myself.
They made me
a number among millions.

But my rights have no number.
My home had no number.
I could not count the petals of the flowers.
My childhood in the garden
had no limits on it.

Take me back to my country
and I can show you the numbers.
The numbers who suffer.
The quantities of beauty.
The fallen flowers.

Mohamed Assaf