Displaying their characteristic, fearless virtuosity, multiple-GRAMMY®-winning ensemble The Crossing offers a new album born of cultural resonance, with new works by three of the most creative composers working today. The performances on OCHRE are both rigorous and supple, moving from the intriguing, foggy textures of George Lewis to Caroline Shaw’s primarily wordless, quiet contemplation of the Earth, to Ayanna Woods’ inspired determination to live in a better world.
This is The Crossing’s 13th release on Navona Records, and it is a special one. Topical, timely, and forward-looking, these performances of the 24-voice ensemble led by conductor Donald Nally demonstrate why Gramophone recently observed the group’s ability to “sustain long lines, clarify layers of dense counterpoint and pinpoint the expressive intent of every detail, however minute or cataclysmic.”
SHIFT
words and music by Ayanna Woods
Shift (movement) premiered as a film on November 2, 2020, part of the pre-election project The Crossing Votes: 2020. Refrain premiered June 18, 2021 at The Month of Moderns at Awbury Arboretum in Philadelphia. Bound premiered on July 27, 2021 at Story Mill in Bozeman, Montana, presented by the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana.
1. Refrain
Commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally.
“For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant “Never.””
–Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
“They earnestly believe that it is too soon to do away with plantation justice.”
–Bella Bahhs, 2021
wait
wait and see
see, wait
wait for—
(four, five, six, seven)
wait more
more weight
wait for the video
(thirteen)
wait for the video to be released
(sixteen... eighteen)
wait to be released
soon
(twenty, twenty-one)
wait for release
soon
soon
(you too, soon)
too soon, wait—
wait and see
see, wait
just wait
wait a while and see
wait while you see
wait. see. wait. see.
just a while
a just while
just
2. Shift
Commissioned by Thomas Kasdorf for The Crossing Votes: 2020 – a pre-election film project by The Crossing, Four/Ten Media, and Digital Mission Audio Services.
Why do we build monuments in stone?
Stone is brittle. When it cracks, it cuts to your churning core, America.
Tectonic plates collide; you shift in your seat.
I want a monument we imagine and reimagine and reimagine—
A monument we grasp and heave and pull in a long arc
bursting through the cracks in the story you tell, America.
3. Bound
Commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally.
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
– Angela Davis
“Power. Transformation. Miracles. I want it. I need it. I gots to have it. Right Now!”
– a Black Liberation chant, as taught by Dream Defenders
for my grandmother
for my grandmother’s hands
for the work of her hands
for her loving labor
for my grandfather
for my grandfather’s feet
for the pounding of his feet
for his loving labor
for the transformation
their loving labor
brought we inhabit
for a transformation
we are bound
right now
with our hands
with the work of our hands
with our feet
with the pounding of our feet
Right Now!
A Cluster of Instincts
music by George Lewis
words by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally and premiered on September 17, 2022 at Kings Oaks Farm in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
There is a great wall in the fog and rain.
There are some mountains in the mist.
There is the line of a wall in the mist. I go in and out of the fog on the rim trail, and the mountains rise in fog among yellow leaves.
There is a veil of fog between her and a sunlit flank of yellow leaves.
Slow-whirling galaxies allow stars and gas to fall into hot disks of matter, orbiting around massive holes in the centers of the galaxies, allowing a branch to spring up at the moment when snow melts from it.
Your concentration is interrupted by a shadow on the periphery of your memory of her.
Your concentration is a large array, where debris in the mind appears in an intense shower of heat radiation, like a cluster of instincts to the body.
–“Fog” (2009) by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Used with permission.
Ochre
music by Caroline Shaw
words from various sources by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred Tennyson, Josquin des Prez, and Caroline Shaw
Commissioned by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music for The Crossing and Donald Nally,
Cantori New York, Notre Dame Vocale, and Volti.
This recording of Ochre is dedicated to the memory of Carmen Helena Téllez.
From the composer:
I like to write music for voices without text, because it allows the voice to be a colorful instrument independent of language. And I like to combine different kinds of text, fragments from various eras and sources, to build a nuanced frame for thinking about a subject. Ochre lives more in vowels and timbres than in text, but I’ve woven in fragments of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (which frames human existence with metaphors of geologic time, iron ore, rock), as well as a partial setting of Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied" in Longfellow’s translation. (Goethe was a geologist, and goethite — a common mineral in ochres — is named for him.) In general, there is both a mournful quality to this material, but also a sense of joy and wonder about the planet, and really about music and the voice.
The fifth movement contains the formula for the iron oxide compound hematite — Fe2O3 in its unhydrated form, resulting in red ochre — and Fe2O3 · H2O for the yellow ochre of hydrated hematite.
I have been inspired by the work of Heidi Gustafson, an artist and ochre specialist. From her Dust to Dust: A Geology of Color:
Humans are themselves displays of complex sedimentary processes. “In the human there is material, fragment, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos,” a stone-loving Nietzsche once proclaimed (Beyond Good and Evil, 117). We grow magnetite rocks in our heads, hematite in our organs, carbonates in our bones, gorgeous crystalline geodes in our kidneys, and when we die, our minerals are redistributed, largely as ashes or clumps of carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, and a handful of other elements. Dust to dust.
I.
wordless
II.
Overall
quiet now
hearest thou
a breath
–fragments from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wandrers Nachtlied 2
The solid earth whereon we tread.
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man.
–Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118
III.
Scarpèd cliff and quarried stone
–Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 56
VI.
wordless
V.
Mille regretz, de vous abandonner
Et d’eslonger…
Quon me verra [brief mes jours definer.]
My brief days…so soon
Translation:
A thousand regrets at deserting you
and leaving behind…
That it seems [soon my days will dwindle away.]
–fragment from a 15th-c. chanson, att. to Josquin des Prez
VI.
Contemplate all this work of Time,
…
As dying Nature’s earth and lime;
Within oneself, from more to more;
…
Life is not as idle ore.
–Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118
VII.
hear hush still quiet sleep
now you all wait soon
THE CROSSING
Walter Aldrich LS • Isobel Anthony LS • Katy Avery W LS • Nathaniel Barnett W • Kelly Ann Bixby LS • Karen Blanchard W LS • Steven Bradshaw * W LS • Matthew Cramer LS • Colin Dill W • Micah Dingler W LS • Ryan Fleming LS • Joanna Gates W LS • Dimitri German W • Dominic German W • Steven Hyder W LS • Michael Jones * W LS • Lauren Kelly W LS • Anika Kildegaard W LS • Heidi Kurtz W LS • Chelsea Lyons W • Maren Montalbano * W LS • Rebecca Myers W • Daniel O’Dea LS • James Reese W • Daniel Schwartz W LS • Thann Scoggin LS • Rebecca Siler * W LS • Tiana Sorenson W LS • Daniel Spratlan W LS • Elisa Sutherland W LS • Daniel Taylor W LS
W = Woods
LS = Lewis/Shaw
* Soloist in SHIFT
Daniel Schwartz vibraphone
Donald Nally conductor
Kevin Vondrak assistant conductor & artistic associate
John Grecia & John Walthausen keyboards
John Conahan & Tim Lambert guest keyboards
Paul Vazquez sound design
Benjamin Perri production assistant
Recording Producers: Paul Vazquez, Donald Nally, & Kevin Vondrak
Recording Engineer: Paul Vazquez
Assistant Recording Engineer: Dante Portella & Codi Yhap
Editing, Mixing, and Mastering: Paul Vazquez
Album artwork by Paul du Coudray – paulducoudray.com
SHIFT was recorded August 24, 2021; A Cluster of Instincts was recorded December 10, 2022; Ochre was recorded December 12-13, 2022. All sessions were at St. Peter’s Church in the Great Valley, Malvern, Pennsylvania
This album is made possible through the generous support of an Carol Westfall.
Additional funding was provided, in part, by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.
We are grateful for:
our artists, composers, audience, friends, and supporters;
the staff and congregation at our home, The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill;
Alex Cohen and Clara Weishahn at Kings Oaks Farm;
Heidi Kurtz and Beth van de Water for hospitality;
generous funding from Carol Westfall, Thomas Kasdorf and Kalamazoo Community Foundation, Neubauer Family Foundation, Alpin J. and Alpin W. Cameron Memorial Fund, Anne M. and Philip H. Glatfelter III Family Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., and Presser Foundation
those who opened their homes to our artists during the recording of Ochre: David and Rebecca Thornburgh, Jeff and Liz Podraza, Corbin Abernathy and Andrew Beck, Dan Schwartz and Michael Rowley, Lauren Kelly and Henry Koch, Rebecca and Mark Bernstein, Steven Hyder and Donald Nally.