Our First Demo: “How You Find His Love”
We’re very excited to share the first demo from The Sparrow: “How You Find His Love.”
There is something slightly terrifying about releasing the first song from a new musical.
For months, The Sparrow has existed mostly behind closed doors: in scripts and scores, voice notes and rewrites, conversations about characters, and songs that have changed shape more times than we can count. Today, for the first time, we’re opening that door a little.
The Sparrow is a new chamber musical inspired by Giovanni Verga’s Storia di una capinera. Set in Sicily in 1854, during a cholera epidemic, it follows Maria, a twenty-year-old novice who has spent most of her life in a convent. When the epidemic forces her to return temporarily to her family in the countryside, she encounters a world she has almost forgotten.
Fields. Trees. Birds. Open sky. And, almost immediately, a problem. Because Maria has been taught that the world is something to distrust.
“How You Find His Love” begins with a simple question: if God created all this beauty, why should loving it take her further away from Him?
Maria has spent years learning where the boundaries are supposed to lie — between the sacred and the worldly, devotion and temptation, Heaven and Earth. But outside the convent walls, those boundaries suddenly become much harder to see.
“But the rivers sing, And the hills are shining, All creation seems to pray…”
For perhaps the first time, faith does not feel to Maria like a set of instructions she has memorised. She feels it in the wind, in the trees, in the freedom of walking through the countryside.
And that exhilaration frightens her.
The song sits at the beginning of Maria’s journey, before she fully understands what she wants or where her questions will lead her. The voice of the convent is still with her — quite literally — warning her that beauty can deceive, that obedience is safety, that a good and humble nun should keep her eyes on the path already chosen for her.
Maria begins to wonder whether that is really true.
Is denying the world how you find His love? Or could loving the world be another way of finding Him?
That question will become much more complicated as The Sparrow unfolds.
This is the first demo we have released from the show, and very much a snapshot of a musical still in development. The book is changing. The songs are evolving. We’re continuing to discover these characters as we work.
But this felt like the right place to begin. With Maria, outside the convent walls, lifting her eyes.
“How You Find His Love”
Music by Olly Novello
Book & Lyrics by Nicholas Pratt
We hope you enjoy our first glimpse into this world.
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