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The Ultimate Promise of Staying Here

The Ultimate Promise of Staying Here

Astrid Sonne Staying Here (2024)

Danish composer and viola player Astrid Sonne’s first two albums were purely instrumental: “I’m so awful at writing [lyrics], I would do anything to avoid it,” she said in an interview back in 2019. Fortunately, she’s changed her mind: Sonne’s third album Great Doubt is filled with careful singer-songwriter-style lyrics while losing none of her experimental, classical-meets-electronic sound.

The track “Staying Here”, for example, features no percussion, but winds itself around a melody played on a church organ. Combined with the lyrics, “Lost my ring, here’s my palm,” the image is crystal clear: Someone is getting married.

As long-lasting as the love it symbolizes: The wedding ring (depicted is an engraved example from 7th century Byzantium). © Public Domain

Sonne has chosen a particular and evocative storytelling element: Wedding rings were already a thing in Ancient Egypt as well as in Greek and Roman antiquity. They have remained the symbol of loving devotion ever since.

Throughout the centuries, the rings varied in style: In 17th-century Europe, they often included an engraved “Poesy”; the Puritans, ever, uh, puritan, gifted their brides a thimble instead of a ring (although they were allowed to cut off the bottom of the thimble and wear that as a wedding band. My, my, Jeremiah!).

Some elements of the tradition are, however, a lot more recent: Men only started to wear wedding rings in the last century, and the diamond ring reached its fairytale-standard-status only as recently as 1948 when the jeweler house De Beers launched the slogan, “A Diamond is Forever.” As with all the other ring styles, the diamond will probably not really be forever—but the symbol of the ring itself, it seems, just might be.

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