PROGRAM

The Book of Never (2022) Aaron Helgeson
— world premiere —

Passions of other people…
(The world’s a town)
Burns I’d like to forget…
(The world’s a town)
Tears I’ve never wept
(The world’s a town)
Names of things I once believed…

commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Competition
at Brigham Young University
with generous support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition
at the University of Chicago

The Book of Colors (2022) Marcos Balter
— world premiere —

1. The purest hue
2. Stubborn Green
3. We glide through the blue like an arrow
4. A hiss of dust through the air of the night

commissioned by The Crossing and San Diego Master Chorale

Darest thou now O soul? (2022) Gabriel Jackson
— world premiere —

a gift from the composer, at the request of Steven Hyder,
in celebration of Donald Nally’s 60th birthday

This concert is being recorded for broadcast by our partner WRTI 90.1 FM,
Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz Public Radio Station

NOTES + TEXTS

The Book of Never
music and text by Aaron Helgeson, adapted from the Novgorod Codex, with words by Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, The Rolling Stones, Andre Singer, Gertrude Stein, and Thanha Lai

commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Competition at Brigham Young University with generous support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago

a note from the composer:

The Book of Never lasts two thirds of an hour. But it took one thousand years to make.

It begins with the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the Ukrainian village of Novgorod, sent to convert the town from Paganism to Orthodox Christianity. But when word of Isaakiy’s use of Pagan ritual reached the church elite, he and the entire village were excommunicated for heresy. Through destruction of sacred icons, texts, and writing tools, this meant a complete erasure of any written records of Novgorod, its language, and its religion.

And so, Isaakiy set out to save the collective memory of Novgorod. Using his wooden book as a writing tablet, he poured dozens of wax layers over the psalms carved into its pages, marking each with text, and making paper rubbings of the words he was attempting to preserve—his dualistic prayers, the first written instances of the Rus’ alphabet, sarcastic and scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. Isaakiy’s paper rubbings are lost to the decay of time, but scratches on the wood and wax remain.

There they stayed, out of sight until discovered in the year 2000 (exactly one millennium later) among the ancient remnants of Novgorod, perfectly preserved in mud, with thousands of tiny glyphs scratched into a mass of hardened and broken wax. The codex was quickly taken to the world’s foremost Slavonic linguist, Andrei Zaliznyak, who meticulously parsed through the overlapped writing to find letters, then words, then phrases. The resulting text is somewhere between liturgy, the chanting of a vindictive spell, a recitation of sins, and a grammar lesson.

The Book of Never freely collages text fragments from English translations of the Novgorod Codex with individual words and phrases by twentieth century writers in exile:

• Oscar Wilde’s scathing letter to his lover Alfred Douglas written while imprisoned for his homosexuality

• The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street recorded by the band in France while avoiding tax debt.

• Chilean expat Pablo Naruda’s epic history of the Americas in Cantos General.

• An interview with philosopher and black rights activist Angela Davis from the Marin County Women’s Detention Facility

• the poetry of musician and holocaust survivor Andre Singer.

• Thanhhà Lại’s autobiographical verse novel Inside Out and Back Again about the young daughter of a Vietnamese refuge family growing up in Alabama.

• Gertrude Stein’s prose poem Descriptions of Literature built from cryptic one-sentence description of books in the library she shared with her romantic partner Alice B. Tolkas.

The melodies and chords in The Book of Never were constructed solely from densely collaged fragments (only a few notes each) from the Stichera Alphabetica, a sequence of hymns sung in association with the psalms of the Novgorod Codex’s wooden tablets. The first letters of these hymns spell out the alphabet, echoing the alphabetic sequences found in the Novgorod Codex. These hymn fragments are layered on top of one another, juxtaposed, and harmonized with dense clusters built by simulating extremely long reverberations in digitally engineered virtual spaces.

The long story of The Book of Never has an uncanny epitaph. On a snowy day in December 2017, the precise day I started writing this music, Andrei Zaliznyak died before he could complete his work on the Novgorod Codex. That I would only learn this two years later haunts me to this day.

I. Passions of Other People…

II. (The World’s A Town)

The world’s a town in which we cannot live
The world’s a town
The world’s a town where people breathe
The world’s a town in which we’re never meant to live
The world’s a town
The world’s a town we leave
The world’s a town!

III. Burns I’d Like to Forget…

IV. (The World’s A Town)

You ask me if the fires are burning down my land
(The world’s a town)
You ask me how I sleep at night
(The world’s a town in which we’ll never breathe)
You ask me if my brothers falling one by one has broken me
(The world’s a town we learn)
You ask me whether I approve of hate
(The world’s a town where people cannot pay their way)
You ask me if the crimes I’ve made are pure
(The world’s a town we leave)
You ask me if the judge they murdered could have known
(The world’s a town)
You ask me if the judge that they then stole will chain me in a cage
(The world’s a town in which my petty anger lives)
You ask me if the world makes any sense at all
(The world’s a town we’ll burn)
The world’s a town!

V. Tears I’ve Never Wept…

Blue sky is gray
and love and love
Gray hair is white
and love and toerment
White sail is yellow
and torment and fear
Yellow sun is red
and fear and quiet
Red blood is blue
and quiet sleep
Blue grass is green
and sleep and let go
Green forest is purple
and let go and give
Purple shadows are black
and forgive and understand

VI. (The World’s A Town)

A book invented for the sake of itself
(The world’s a town)
A book describing six and six and seventy-two
(Thw world’s a town)
A book which shows the next and best is to be found out when there is pleasure in the reason
(The world’s a town)
A book of dates and fears
(The world’s a town)
A book with more respect for all who have to hear and have heard it
(The world’s a town)
A book that is narrowly placed upon the shelf
(The world’s a town)
A book which has made all who read it think of the hope they have that sometime they will have fairly nearly all of it at once
(The world’s a town)
A book which manages to impress upon the young that those who oppse them follow them
(The world’s a town)
A book that makes the end come just as soon as it is intended
(The world’s a town)
A book which asks questions of everyone

VII. Names of Things I Once Believed…

I am the sun and I'm the death of stars and I
am light itself
I am
I'm the life and the song and the world's
embrace unending
And I'm trying
And I am practicing to be seen
I'm seen
I am the deliverer of judgement and an
unearthly vision and I am loved
I'm here
I'm the ancient and the ever-present now and
I am all my pain
I am the people
I am an unwanted piece of rubble and I matter
I'm now
I am the story and the purpose
I am the slave and the broken
I'm the chosen name and the one you ask
when you are doubting
I am me before I knew I am myself
I'm myself

Oh God,
I don’t know them,
I don't know their pain,
I don't see them,
I just walk on by like I'd walk up a road to heaven.
Oh my God, what have I done?

 O Lord

I don't want to love myself,
but I will try and see...

 O dear Lord

...now.

The Book of Colors
music and text by Marcos Balter

Commissioned by The Crossing and San Diego Master Chorale

I. The Purest Hue

The purest hue, the kindest light, 
In gold yellow, emerging, 
Blasts in the void like music, 
A thousand strings of glisten. 
It glows neither warm nor cold, 
Showering walls in amber. 
The windows ablaze, wide open, 
The air swarming with glitter 
Inside the sluggish rooms that slumber, 
Inventing lines and limits. 
The world is quiet but breathing 
And the streets are growing wider. 
In vain, the clouds of smog above the city 
Cast shadows in tall buildings. 
And slowly, behind the red horizon, 
A sudden blue arrives, 
And, blending with the yellow, fades to silver.

II. Stubborn Green

Stubborn green sprouting from the barren tendril
Under the crumbled vestige 
Of old dwellings and detritus, in insubordination.
Worthless wonder, glitchy marvel, freak of nature,
Hunting light in the thick of winter. 
A weed is not flower, there is no garden.

III. We Glide Through the Blue Like an Arrow

We glide through the blue like an arrow as the wind blows,
The momentum beneath us making haste, 
Flowing down the stream adrift and weightless.
The sound of the water reminds me of its color.
We fly like planes as we stare at the sky 
And follow the river till the end of its journey.

IV. A hiss of dust through the air of the night

A hiss of dust though the air of the night, the ominous tinges of white
Erasing the frosted mountains in the distance. 
A chilly hush lingers over the valleys as the snow falls, and the plains
Blanch every green like a monochromatic river. 
Icy-cold hexagonal droplets drunkenly dancing to the silence, 
Iridescent apposed to the brightness of the moon, 
Surround the pine trees crowning the ridges. 
Underneath the frozen waters there is life, sleeping. 
Down below the bottom of the creek there is a quiet revolution
Thawing the stream in defiant bursts of warmth, presaging springtime.
A silvery line fractures the glacier. 
A loud thunder from the darkness of the forest rings in the storm through the wind,
Deep and resounding. 
A shivery feeling of emptiness 
Casting shadows under the canopies, 
Black and mysterious in their lightlessness, 
Like demons in the heart of winter.

Darest thou now O soul?
music by Gabriel Jackson
words by Walt Whitman

A gift from the composer, at the request of Steven Hyder, in celebration of Donald Nally’s 60th birthday

a note from the composer:

Darest thou now O soul? was written as a gift for Donald Nally’s 60th birthday though due to various (probably) pandemic-related inadequacies on my part he didn’t actually receive it until the very end of his 60th birthday year. Donald is a huge admirer of Walt Whitman, as am I, having set Whitman texts in a number of other pieces, and if anyone dares to walk out “toward the unknown region” on an almost daily basis it is Donald, not just with The Crossing but in everything he does, it seems to me; it is that pioneering, visionary spirit of Donald’s, so eloquently (if retroactively) evoked by Whitman, that this piece seeks to celebrate.

To do any kind of justice to Whitman’s astonishing text the full panoply of possibilities afforded by a virtuoso group like The Crossing is clearly essential. The supreme strangeness of Whitman’s vision, as well as its almost-inexpressible ecstasy is recreated, I hope, by various distortions, prolongations (and sometimes compressions) of a conventional musical flow: the unnaturally protracted melismas, a mobile-yet-immobile cluster of six solo sopranos replete with “eternal” stutter-rhythm at the close for the unknown region itself; frequent juxtapositions of textures of great complexity with the utmost simplicity—a single thread of monody or even a brusque, super-brief chord; phrases that one would expect to be loud but are actually pianissimo, or a momentary shout in a sea of quietude that highlights the most unlikely word; a rhythmically complex tenor line, so jagged and ornate in its fervour, that it takes ten bars to articulate just five syllables; a murky netherworld of perpetually overlapping glissandos to underpin the sopranos’ ululations at “this inaccessible land”; the uprushing, gushing shouts of “O joy” that will not stop, so irrepressible is their need to celebrate. I hope that through these and other means I have done some justice to that land where “All waits undream’d of” and where we too might “float,/In Time and Space”, if only for a few celebratory minutes.

Darest thou now O Soul

DAREST thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O
soul.

TEAM

The Crossing

Katy Avery
Nathaniel Barnett
Jessica Beebe
Steven Berlanga
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw
Colin Dill
Micah Dingler
Ryan Fleming
Joanna Gates
Dimitri German
Steven Hyder
Michael Jones
Lauren Kelly
Anika Kildegaard
Heidi Kurtz
Maren Montalbano
Rebecca Myers
James Reese
Daniel Schwartz
Rebecca Siler
Tiana Sorenson
Daniel Spratlan
Elisa Sutherland

Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor
John Grecia, keyboards
Ryan Flemming, John Walthausen, guest rehearsal accompanist
Paul Vazquez, sound design
Jonathan Bradley, executive director
Stephanie Lantz-Goldstein, development manager
Shannon McMahon, operations manager
Elizabeth Dugan, bookkeeper
Sam Scheibe, summer associate

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