Like music, our important places help us remember, says TSO chief executive Caroline Sharpen

In May 1916, now a Lieutenant, Kelly was sent to France where remarkably he continued to write music by the light of a candle stub - in the trenches of the Western Front. One of his most poignant works – The Somme Lament – was completed on 28 October 1916.

By then, he had lived through four months of the Battle of the Somme – one of the most painful, tragic and horrific episodes of war. On Day 1 alone – 1 July 1916 – the allies sustained over 57,000 casualties, including the loss of 12,240 young lives. Unfathomable now by any stretch of the imagination.

'The land … is an indescribable scene of desolation,' Kelly wrote.

'As far as one could see - there was no sign of vegetable life, just a sea of lacerated earth, with - here and there - the traces of a former trench system.

The presence of these trenches was confirmed by the corpses – some of them horribly mangled and with glazed eyes, others trodden almost out of sight into the mud.

I was haunted by the sense of terrible tragedy – the triumph of death / and / destruction over life.'

Just two weeks after the completion of The Somme Lament, Kelly had a premonition that he would not survive an ensuring skirmish. And, so sadly, he was right. The next day, he was killed while leading an attack on a machine-gun emplacement in the liberation of Beaumont-Hamel. This was three days before the battle of the Somme finally concluded.  He was 35.

Like so many composers before and after him, Kelly managed to pour indescribable feeling borne out of unspeakable experience into music.

Perhaps he - and they - knew what science has since proven: that music speaks directly to the emotional engine room of the brain.  Our amygdala.   Music bypasses the neural pathways of language and forces its way into our centre of feeling.

In this way, music has become one of the most powerful forms of documentation. Messages, through time, that describe feelings through sound; that provide a window into the lived experience and the heart of its authors.

They tell us:

This - is what horror sounds like.

This - is what grief and despair sound like.

This - is what dissociation sounds like.

You must know this sound.

You must feel this feeling.

And you must remember.

Thus, we turn to our composers, and their music when words fail us.

In the great canon of art born out of human battle, bravery, sacrifice and loss – music has been a constant. A balm that anchors us in shared experience as we grieve the human cost.

Music, and the profound symbolism of places such as this upon which we stand, hold us.

Music helps us know what it sounds like to prevail, to love, to feel joy in our communities - and the way of life that our servicemen and women have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect.

Thank you, musicians and choristers of the TSO.