Across the Open Spaces
In the thick of the covid pandemic, I had a month-long residency at Monson Arts in rural Maine, along the Appalachian trail. Hoo boy, the isolation really hit home. I started putting this program together then, thinking that KHORIKOS would pull off some elaborate mid-pandemic retreat to learn and record it all. Instead, we held off recording until 2022, and the album is finally ready. We’re currently pitching it to labels to get some help in getting it out there (know anyone?) and we recently performed the collection in three shows at the Sound Scene Festival at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in DC.
KHORIKOS programs have tend to follow psychological progressions, and yeah, this mapped right on to that pandemic classic: isolation → perverse excitement about having a break from normal reality → reconnection with nature → loneliness settling in. I sat in the middle of the Venn diagram of “music about nature” and “music about loneliness” and there appeared “Maardurand,” one of our earlier commissions from Evelin Seppar.
This piece is a walk along the ocean shore, and “the gentle ecstasy of loneliness.” It’s the catharsis part of the program, before things get darker.
Of course KHORIKOS has a resident medieval music scholar, Andrew Albin, who gave us permission to dig into nasty parallel intervals and tritones in our arrangement of some chant by Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th century nun who is having a moment.
The dissonance in this piece serves as a musical foundation for the next few pieces, which zoom in on the pain of loneliness and the prospect of learning what you can from it. Of course, the blessed vaccines and lower case numbers saved KHORIKOS and all live music eventually, but in the meantime that isolation was a great teacher. The opportunity to redefine your relationship with suffering is not to be taken for granted.
Paul Doust and I set out to arrange Anna Meredith’s “Heal You,” blowing it up from three into twelve voice parts. The result is a precarious chaos/order balance, and unusually individualistic singing for KHORIKOS. It’s not supposed to be an immaculate blend; instead, it’s our community of singers at its most actualized, and one of the most powerful musical moments of my life.
I wrote about the opening piece, “Canon Triplex and other limitations,” a bit more here.
All credit and glory to Renee Gladman for her beautiful art, which will adorn the album’s cover. Coming soon :)
