Cecilia Eng IF HoF

In the late 1950's, Cecilia's ballet career was cut short at the age of 3 or 4 when she absolutely, positively refused to play a mushroom in the Nutcracker Suite, taking a stand against racial profiling before she knew what it was. She never took to the piano lessons, much to her later regret (it would have made it much easier to write midi accompaniment for a number of Firebird Arts & Music CDs!). In grade school, when she asked to learn the flute, the adults consulted and decided her fingers would have trouble with the fingering and she found herself with a French horn and was told that it would sound much like a flute (not!). She learned to sing from Julie Andrews movies and Peter, Paul and Mary records and learned guitar from various family members. Harmony, she picked up from church hymnals when she found she couldn't sing in the key everyone else sang, but noticed there were convenient harmony notes in the hymnal.

So when Cecilia discovered filk music in the mid-1980's she was well-prepared by past artistic endeavors, and fell in with friends who wanted to sing about Dr. Who, Blake's Seven, Star Trek, and songs about science fiction and fantasy books! She was soon writing lyrics and original music and performing at conventions across the US, Canada and England. Recording projects followed, first with Off Centaur and then with Firebird.

At the end of that decade, the local filk group was told that Firebird would no longer bring its product to convention dealer rooms, so Friends of Filk was created to keep filk music available in the local dealer rooms. The surplus funds from cassette and CD sales were used to bring music guests to the Pacific Northwest. Cecilia's music as well as her ongoing volunteer work with Friends of Filk led to her being inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame at FilKONtario in April 2013.

Listen to her music at:
soundcloud.com/cecilia-eng-320153920
gumroad.com/l/conflikt2015-cecelia
soundcloud.com/northwestfolklifefestival/ceciliaenglive2019

Find her at:
friendsoffilk.org
fawm.org... her FAWMer name is Ceilidh

Representative Work for the 2020 Pegasus Awards

Earth That Was (mp3)

Words and Music: Copyright ©2007 by Cecilia Eng
All Rights Reserved
Lyrics posted with permission of the author
based on Joss Whedon's "Serenity - The Movie"

V1
Too many souls upon the earth -
There was nothing left to give
So we took ship and left to find
A star where we could live.
But though our star has planets fine
And moons most fair to roam,
Once each Earth year we celebrate
The place we once called home. CHORUS

V2
And children who were born and raised
And died along the way
Still honored Earth's old calendar
To number all their days.
For every planet, every moon
Has seasons of their own
But standard time belongs to Earth
No matter where we've flown. CHORUS

V3
Though we take pride in every stride
That keeps us hale and free,
Each day we fight to carve a place
To raise a family.
But each moon that we terraform
To make oceans, air and streams
Is merely one more echo of
The place we see in dreams. CHORUS

V4 Now cultures from our distant past
Have here begun to blend.
We hope for peace, surviving war
And now must learn to mend.
For though the war was bitter,
We must bind our wounds and pause.
On this one day we'll stop to say
We remember Earth That Was! CHORUS

Tagline:
We remember thee today!