CIVITAS
A two-concert event based around the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, which chronicle the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, or
grief, in four chapters: collapse, recovery, returning, rebuilding.
The Renaissance-era choral settings of the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah texts all begin with a Hebrew letter, literally “Aleph,” “Bet,” etc. set to music. Those letter-pieces are often a minute or so long, and are (to my ear) way juicier and more dramatic than the music that follows. My very unofficial and non-peer-reviewed take on this is that the biblical text was the *gig*, and the letters themselves gave the composers the opportunity to express something more fully and react against the constraints of the text, or even against the text itself.
This framework became two concerts, called Lesson One and Lesson Two, filled with these Renaissance-era letter-pieces and (mostly) contemporary or brand-new pieces, which replaced the musical settings of the biblical texts that would have followed originally. Each of those ancient texts screams at us about loss.
It’s the biggest concert project that both KHORIKOS and I have ever done: 34 scores, five world premieres (including two of my own,) and nine months of immeasurable dedication from the ensemble that is my spiritual home.
Denise Levertov’s poetry bookends the program, marking the climax in Lesson Two, and opening Lesson One with this setting by Andrew Smith:
Lap up the vowels
of sorrow
transparent, cold
water-darkness welling
up from the white sand.
Hone the blade
of a scythe to cut swathes of light sound in the mind.
Through the hollow globe, a ring
of frayed rusty scrapiron,
is it the sea that shines?
Is it a road at the world’s edge?
The first half of Lesson One is desperation and chaos, as in this primal yell from composer Roderick Williams:
(That’s four sopranos at the back of the space, and Benny Weisman cantoring furiously from the lectern.)
Then, humility. Part Two of Lesson One is a snapshot of that moment when you’re spent from grief and ready for anything else. I don’t believe in the same gods that John Tavener did, but the “anything else” he speaks to is impossibly bright. Maybe it’s that hope doesn’t need to be rational to be motivating, or that “anything else” is not actual heaven, but still here, somewhere.
Life, a shadow and a dream. This about sums up the tenuous relationship with purpose we have in the wake of collapse. What are we even doing? Why rebuild?
Lesson Two starts over, with a new lens. If everything so far was “grief and what we tend to do with it,” this is more like “grief and what there is to be done with it.”
The passage that follows “Zain” in the Bible is an account of lost treasures and gloating enemies. Instead, Cecilia McDowall’s music is clearer and colder than anything yet, and still so hopeful.
(That’s soprano Manon Blackman, soaring.)
Later in the piece:
A flame alight in hours before infinity,
In the presence of death leaving all enmity:
In view of God we are air after breath.
Composer Ben Zucker read Denise Levertov’s “The Cry” like a sacred text, alongside the Latin it replaced.
This is it: O VOS OMNES ATTENDITE. Everyone LISTEN. Is there any sorrow like my sorrow? Is it nothing to you?
I put this whole program together and commissioned this piece from Ben well before the events of October 7th, 2023 and the horror that has followed. The “unrendering” that Ben’s piece points to continues to unfold because of our collective inability to look clearly at our collected pain.
It’s hard enough to seriously examine our own suffering and find a “road at the world’s edge,” but can we actually carve some collective path forward out of someone else’s? Not even Levertov can answer plainly:
No pulsations
of passionate rhetoric will
suffice.
If there were a clear takeaway here — a concrete action item — there would be no reason to do this concert, or bother with music in general. On one hand, a catharsis does happen, then a denoument; the musical flow closes. On the other, I’m still puzzling over the open colons at the end of the poem:
eternity:
being:
milk:
Explore the two complete programs, including all texts and their biblical counterparts:
I’m deeply grateful for the scholarship of Andrew Albin, Emily Cohen, and Carah Naseem, and the musicianship of Charlotte Greve and every singer in KHORIKOS for articulating what hadn’t yet been.
