If There Were Water
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Crossings Cycle Stratis Minakakis
un/bodying/s Gregory W. Brown
Crossings Cycle (2015/2017)
Stratis Minakakis
Crossings’ Epigrams
Epigram 1 2:31
Epigram 2 4:16
Crossings
…if there were water… 6:05
…who is the third… 3:49
Crossings’ Epigrams
Epigram 3 4:02
un/bodying/s (2017)
Gregory W. Brown
1. The Meeting of
the Waters 8:03
2. The Valley of
Lost Names 5:56
3. Questions for a
Disincorporation/Atlantis
9:59
4. Poem with Any End 8:24
—53:08—
Texts
Crossings
Cycle
Stratis Minakakis (b.
1979)
Crossings
July 2015, Island of Lesvos, Greece. We
arrive at the island of Lesvos at the same time as a massive influx of refugees
from Syria lands on the Greek shores. Lesvos is the primary destination for the
hordes of flimsy inflatable boats, the transportation means of choice of the
Turkish smugglers. The number of families with pregnant women or small children
that arrive is astonishing. Toddlers younger than my then three-year-old
daughter, newborns, and their exhausted parents, brave the unforgiving heat
without food or water as they walk the 60 kilometers of mountainous terrain
that separate our resort town of Mithymna from the
port of Mytilene. There, they will endure unspeakable hardships for days until
a boat chartered by the Greek government, itself collapsing under the
uncontrollable financial crisis, transfers them to the port of Piraeus. From
there, most will walk for three weeks to reach someplace in Europe, hopefully
Germany or Sweden. As I am thinking about this piece, my wife suggests
rereading the The Waste Land. The verses “if there were
water and no rock” and “who is the third who walks always beside you” seem
painfully relevant.
Crossings’ Epigrams
Crossings’ Epigrams is an elegy on things irretrievably lost.
Once again, I turned to Ancient Greek literature because it expresses something
about the human condition that resonates deeply within me. Three text fragments
are interwoven throughout the three short movements that comprise Crossings’
Epigrams: the moment where Odysseus tries to grasp the fleeting vision of
his mother, which escapes like a ‘shadow’, or a ‘dream’ (Homer, Odyssey,
Book 11); the lines uttered to Antigone by the exhausted old Oedipus as they
arrive in Athens, where they plan to seek refuge (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus); Hecuba's lament over the fall of Troy and
collapse of the House of Priam (Euripides, The Trojan Women). Epigram
I is a fantasy on the words ‘shadow’ and ‘dream’
of the Homeric text. Epigram II interlaces Odysseus’ agonizing
description with Oedipus’ painful realization regarding his current state. Epigram
III presents Hecuba’s lament, echoed in distortion by the sea waves,
transforming to a chaotic primordial cry. Shadows of the Homeric text trace an
invisible but omnipresent line that connects the three Epigrams.
Crossings’ Epigrams can be performed autonomously, or in
conjunction with Crossings. In the second case, as heard here, Epigrams I
and II are performed as a unit before Crossings; Epigram III
is performed immediately after the conclusion of Crossings.
—Stratis Minakakis
Crossings
Cycle
Crossings’
Epigrams (set in the original Greek)
…Three times I sprang
Toward her, and my will said, ‘Clasp her’,
and three times
She flitted from my arms like a shadow or a
dream…
– Homer,
Odyssey, Book 11, 206-208 (trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock)
…Little do I crave, and obtain
Still less than that little, and with that I
am content...
–
Sophocles,
Oedipus at Colonus, 5-6 (trans. Sir Richard C. Jebb)
…Lift your head, unhappy one, from the ground;
raise up your neck;
This is Troy no more…
–Euripides, The
Trojan Women, 98-99 (trans. E. P. Coleridge)
Crossings
…if there were water…
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water.
–
T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land, V. What the Thunder Said, 246-250
…who is the third…
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, V.
“What the Thunder Said,” 360
un/bodying/s
See PDF for specific text formatting
[ NOTE
TO PHILIP: THIS PERMISSION SHOULD FOLLOW TODD’S TEXT AS FOUND IN THE PDF]
Notes
un/bodying/s
Gregory W. Brown (b. 1974)
text by Todd Hearon
(b. 1968)
The Quabbin
Reservoir is located in the former Swift River Valley of western Massachusetts.
Engineers had been considering the Swift River Valley for a reservoir to ease
the growing demands for fresh water in Boston since about 1895. In 1938 the
towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield, and Greenwich were legally disincorporated and the valley, now cleared of all things
human, was flooded until it reached its 400 billion gallon
capacity in 1946.
In the first part of un/bodying/s I
took Todd’s language as a cue to represent an avalanche of culture enveloping a
landscape. The music is dizzying at times, and references a variety of styles
and textures. It is a jumble of rock tumbling down the hillside — a river
cascading to the sea. Water symbolizes various things in various cultures: a
bridge to the underworld, dream-space, the subconscious, flow and vitality
(here dammed and controlled). Water has its own story here — its own migration
through our environment.
Any story of diaspora is also a human story,
and the second part of un/bodying/s settles into a calm and
reflective pool. The music is relatively stable in harmony and style. We see
individuals going about their daily work. We see human detail and
intimacy.
Part 3 is all about place and time.
Displacement can be a result of movement in space, in time, or both. The music
goes into a deep nostalgic past, perhaps to the 1938 Enfield Farewell Ball
itself, here inhabited by trees and birds made human in the mind’s eye. The
record skips – itself a displacement of phonograph needle both in space (to
another groove) and time (to repeat the immediate past). The 7,000+ graves are
carefully removed and reinterred in a new cemetery. The fields, now covered in
ice, are locked in summer. The birds return, and it is suddenly simultaneously
winter, spring, and summer.
Humans collectively form a diaspora from the
past, pushed out of the present into the foreign future. The islands, still
referred to by their mountain names, poke through the surface of Quabbin and intrude into the present as a sort of
geographic palimpsest. In a similar way, Atlantis intrudes into the
reverie of Part 3. Utopic Atlantis has haunted Western culture for millennia:
The notion that we were perfect… before it all fell apart… before the flood.
The speaker looks up through the water at the sun, now turned blue and distant.
Culture is rendered undecipherable and forgotten; the speaker longs to be
moving.
Part 4 brings us to Boston, John
Winthrop’s City Upon a Hill. The music is staid and implacable
and references Renaissance techniques and textures, placing it firmly in the
erudite and urbane city. We quickly detour into the madness that are the
streets of present-day Boston and into an uncertain future, haunted by
sea-level rise. Out of Boston we confront the question that is the heart of Quabbin, and of all civilization: How do cities meet the
demand for water? At what cost? Rome had its methods, and their architecture
remains and reminds us of the importance of water to all peoples at all times.
We watch the water flow back downhill to Boston as it makes its cycle. That
deep human longing to see our home through “unbeclouded
eyes” is fleeting and ultimately we are reminded that
all cultures pass.
–
Gregory W. Brown
Todd
Hearon
“I
have made
an
elegy for myself it
is
true”
—Geoffrey
Hill, i.m., 1932–2016
1.
The Meeting of the Waters
Sempiternal waters, sing-
ly sing, gush glottal-less & all
onomatopoetical your
triphthong’s liquid pluraling
through
rock & ruck & rill
purl,
pounce, pronounce & preen the sourceless
flourish
of your sundry selves, unseamed
anima,
antiphonal
Ursprache,
ensembling
in simul-
taneous tumult the babbling
Earth’s
eternal tongues;
O airy
Yggdrasil,
within whose watery limbs
climbs
the burgeoning current
of
birdsong indistinguishable—
wren-trickle,
thrush’s trill,
aria
of orioles
dissolved
in the dawn chorus
but
intimated tributaries
still:
voicings of a universal
dialect,
a will
gone
malleable & migratory
raptured
in translation, diaspora
becoming
at a stroke
diapason;
O
Ouroboros, origin-&-end,
in
Bacchic spring come thundering
down
the escarpment’s scree & skim
littering
the valley
with
erratics, scattered limbs
of
a glacial language éxtant only in
lacunae,
contour,
kettle,
esker drift,
congregated
relics
where
a village went; what crook
denotes
you truly, what
wandering
wand divines
your
secular in-saecula-
saeculorum sign:
your
mouth’s green myth
pressed
to the ocean’s ear,
your
mountain tale in touch
with
some ridiculous sublime
that
slips like the gopher soul into its hole
surfacing
into the world of time:
The
score includes the following additions:
chipmunk,
Massachusett, moose, Nichewaug,
Nenameseck, racoon, skunk,
woodchuck
1 There is a
land of pure delight,
where saints immortal reign; infinite day excludes the
night, and pleasures banish pain.
— music by
Jeremiah Ingalls
text by Isaac Watts
2.
The Valley of Lost Names
Think
of a time our own names conjure
nothing
but a body of unbroken water
(Moon
over Quabbin.
Body of bottled light
poured
across the body of the water,
something
far, at the surface—finned or feathered?
rolling
in distress—)
at
dawn the sudden, trumpeting eagle
strikes.
The
drowned towns, four-square, hymned in stave & stanza,
swallowed
walls on walls of song, each stone a tongue
where
the salmon canter over the meadow baffle dam
&
small-mouthed bass hosanna…
Too
deeply now for any to remember
so
why does it seem important to remember
when
we will ourselves, these fluent selves, like water
subsumed
in greater water be impossible to remember
to
distinguish the veins in the hand that worked the lathe
wove
the straw, rippled at morning into a gesture of love or praise
or
clipped the dewy lilac from its stem
or
turned the fieldstone into the sunken wall
of
a cellar hole, the jam jars lined within
the
vagrant bittersweet unwinds among
when
the shore recedes (in the twinkling of an eye)
the
tombs stick out like knees.
Deep
in a time that is no longer time
but
the greater dissolutions of the water
within
whose workings ever unspool our names
as
it were (as it will be) upon a ghostly bobbin . . .
3.
Questions for a Disincorporation
“to
undo, separate or dissolve from a body”
Dana,
MA; Prescott, MA; Greenwich, MA; Enfield, MA:
April 28, 1938
A
solitary grebe
filling
itself, in reflection,
into
a globe—
Where
does the body go?
Is it the same
as
the wind in the trees
the wind in the highest
limbs
that
sweeps them uniformly like the necks of swans
swimming
in consort
so they seem in time
with
a music it is impossible to hear
from
this distance
(we
are very far)
—as
in a silent film, the couples dancing,
the
sweeping of light & limbs across the floor
as
across the water’s surface, in reflection,
when
the wind lifts
&
the glacier of a cloud pulls over
&
the mares’ tails fly
like
tribes, nomadic tongues, erratic stars?
<<<<
Winterlong
the
bodies of lost deer
lie
littering the ice.
The
human graves, carved up & carted
to
the minted cemetery on the hill.
The
summer fields, under the frozen surface . . .
(Something
of us remains
Something of us shall not suffer
to
be changed)
In
spring, when the small birds come
back
to the north meadow & the eagle-fretted bones
rise
from the ice
across the breaking floes
as
it were upon another shore
where
does the body, through the fields of other bodies,
go?
Atlantis
About
that country there’s not much left to say. Blue sun, far off, a watery vein
in
the cloud belt. The solid earth itself
unremarkable: familiar ruins
littered
with standing stones our people
had
lost the ability to decipher.
How
deeply had we slept? Beneath the
jellyfish umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,
and
the effervescent stars, cold currents
tugged
at our thoughts like tapestries unraveling into war. All spring
the
nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.
The
rats had abandoned the temples.
My
mind was a voyage hungering to happen.
4.
Poem with Any End
When
all this All doth pass from age to age—
this
City on a Hill, its golden dome
and
cupolas a quiet sea floor,
the
crabbed, neurotic streets still disentangling
obsessive
thirst, obsessive westwardness…
what
is a city without
water?
Rome,
its spidered aqueducts
bearing
the bounty of barbaric springs
down
mountaining arches, a song in the valley
sempiternal waters
sing
over
the sunken ponds & soapstone quarry,
the
Dipper rising with inscrutable stars
over
the village where they made the bobbins
to
slip down dark, infernal aqueducts
(like
shades to slake the high, titanic thirst
of
Boston)
to Boston.
5 O could we
make our doubts remove,
those
gloomy doubts that rise, and see the Canaan that we love with unbeclouded eyes;
—
Ingalls / Watts
The poems of
"un/bodying/s” are printed with kind permission of Todd Hearon. © 2016 All rights reserved. “Atlantis” first
appeared in Strange Land (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and
is reprinted with permission of the author.
The Crossing
Katy Avery
Jessica Beebe
Julie Bishop
Elijah Blaisdell
Karen Blanchard 6
Steven Bradshaw 1
Colin Dill
Micah Dingler
Robert Eisentrout 4
Ryan Fleming
Joanna Gates
Steven Hyder
Michael Jones
Heather Kayan
Heidi Kurtz
Chelsea Lyons
Maren Montalbano 2
Rebecca Myers
Daniel O’Dea
James Reese 1, 4, 5
Daniel Schwartz
Rebecca Siler 3
Daniel Spratlan
Elisa Sutherland 2, 5
Donald Nally,
conductor
John Grecia,
accompanist
1 lead voices in Crossings Cycle
2 solos in The Meeting of the Waters
3 soprano in The Valley of Lost Names
4 duet in The Valley of Lost Names
5 duet in Poem with Any End
6 Karen
Blanchard's performance is made possible through a generous gift from Beth Van
de Water in memory of Hank Van de Water.
The Board of Directors of The Crossing
Steven Bradshaw
Micah Dingler
Tuomi Forrest
Mary D. Hangley
Cynthia A. Jarvis
Mary Kinder Loiselle
Michael M. Meloy
Donald Nally,
Conductor
Becky Oehlers
Eric Owens
Pam Prior, Treasurer
Kim Shiley, Vice
President
Carol Shloss,
Secretary
John Slattery
M. Kathryn Taylor, President
Elizabeth Van de Water
The Staff of The Crossing
Maren Montalbano,
Interim General Manager
Mitchell Bloom, Grant Manager
Lauren Kelly, Production Manager
Kevin Vondrak,
Artistic & Communications Coordinator
Elizabeth Dugan, Bookkeeper
Ari Wyner and Laura
Roth, interns
Recorded by Paul Vazquez and Dante Portella
Audio Post Production by Paul Vazquez
If
There Were Water was recorded June 20 and 23, 2017 at St.
David’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
People
The
Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to
working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for
choir, most often addressing social issues.
Highly sought-after for
collaborative projects, The Crossing’s first collaboration was as the resident
choir of the Spoleto Festival, Italy, in 2007. The Crossing has appeared at
Miller Theatre of Columbia University with the International Contemporary
Ensemble (ICE); the Mostly Mozart Festival and Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Festival; joined Bang on a Can’s first Philadelphia Marathon; and has sung with
the American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, the LA Philharmonic, PRISM
Saxophone Quartet, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora
& Calzadilla, and The Rolling Stones. The
ensemble has performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Kennedy Center,
Carnegie Hall, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Cleveland Art Museum,
National Sawdust, The Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, The Barnes
Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the Big Ears Festival in
Knoxville.
With a commitment to
recording their commissions, The Crossing has thirteen recordings on a variety
of labels. Their collaboration with PRISM, Gavin Bryars’ The
Fifth Century (2016), was named one of The Chicago Tribune’s Top
10 Classical CDs of 2016 and their recording of Thomas Lloyd’s Bonhoeffer (2016)
was nominated for the 2017 GRAMMY as Best Choral Performance. In 2017, they
released Clay Jug: music of Edie Hill, Ted Hearne’s Sound
from the Bench, John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind
and Seven Responses, the culmination
of a collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble featuring new
works of David T. Little, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Santa
Ratniece, Lewis Spratlan,
Hans Thomalla, Caroline Shaw, and Pelle
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. Previous recordings include
Lewis Spratlan’s Vespers Cantata: Hesperus is
Phosphorus (2015, with Network for New Music); Moonstrung Air (choral music of Gregory
Brown, 2015); Christmas Daybreak (2011, with world premiere
recordings of James MacMillan and Gabriel Jackson); I want to live (2011,
with the complete to-date choral works for women by David Lang); and It
is Time (2008, featuring music commissioned for our first Month of
Moderns).
The Crossing is represented
by Alliance Artist Management.
allianceartistmanagement.com
Donald Nally is artistic director at The Crossing and director
of choral organizations at Northwestern University where he holds the John W.
Beattie Chair of Music. Donald has served as chorus master at the Lyric Opera
of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and for many seasons at
the Spoleto Festival in Italy. He has also served as music director of
Cincinnati's Vocal Arts Ensemble, chorus master at The Chicago Bach Project,
and guest conductor throughout Europe and the United States, most notably with
the Grant Park Symphony Chorus, the Philharmonia
Chorus (London), the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and the Latvian State Choir
(Riga).
Donald, with The
Crossing, was named the American Composers Forum 2017 Champion of New Music; he
received the 2017 Michael Korn Founders Award for
Development of the Professional Choral Art from Chorus America. He is the
only conductor to have two ensembles receive the Margaret Hillis Award for
Excellence in Choral Music: in 2002 with the Choral Arts Society of
Philadelphia and in 2015 with The Crossing. Collaborations have included the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center,
Mostly Mozart, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust,
the Barnes Foundation, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the American Composers Orchestra,
and The Big Sky Conservatory in Montana where The Crossing holds an annual
residency.
Stratis Minakakis is a Greek composer and
conductor. His creative work engages issues of memory, cultural identity, and
art as a social testimony; it also explores the rich possibilities engendered
by the interaction between arts and sciences.
As a composer, he has
collaborated with leading performers and ensembles across Europe, North
America, and Japan, such as The Crossing choir, the PRISM and Stockholm
saxophone quartets, the Harry Partch Ensemble, the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble counter) induction, Noh
actress Ryoko Aoki, recorder virtuoso Tosiya Suzuki, flutist Orlando Cela,
pianist Pavlos Antoniadis, and conductors Donald Nally and Rüdiger Bohn.
As a conductor, Stratis has directed and coached numerous chamber music and
orchestral ensembles in contemporary repertory. Also
active in the field of music theory, his recent work focuses on interpretive
analysis of the late string quartet manuscripts by Beethoven. He is the recipient of numerous artistic
prizes, grants, and academic awards from institutions such as the Pew Center
for Arts & Heritage, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania,
the New England Conservatory, the Takefu
International Festival in Japan, the Fondation Royaumont in France, the Center for Mediterranean Music in
Greece, the Greek Composers Union, and the International Society for
Contemporary Music. Deeply committed to music pedagogy, he was awarded the
Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and
the prestigious Louis Krasner Award at the New England Conservatory.
He currently lives in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches Music Theory and Composition at the New
England Conservatory.
www.stratisminakakis.info
Gregory W. Brown
Gregory W.
Brown’s works have been performed across the United States and Europe — most
notably in Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Cadogan
Hall in London, and the Kleine Zaal
of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. His commissions for vocal ensemble New York
Polyphony have been heard on American Public Media’s Performance Today, BBC
Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Kansas Public Radio, and Danish National Radio;
his Missa Charles Darwin (2011) received its
European debut in March 2013 at the Dinosaur Hall of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. In 2017 Missa Charles Darwin was released in a remastered
special-edition to coincide with Dan Brown’s novel Origin, in which it appears.
Gregory’s 2015 CD of
original choral and vocal works — Moonstrung
Air — features The Crossing and was Q2’s Album of the Week in February 2016:
“[Brown’s] command of transcendent sound is constant” and Gapplegate
Classical-Modern Review remarked: “The performances are exemplary, the sound
excellent and the compositions show us that Gregory W. Brown takes to vocal
writing as a natural. The music has eloquence, verve and old-in-new panache.”
www.gregorywbrown.com
Todd Hearon is the author of two books of poems Strange
Land (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and No Other Gods
(Salmon Poetry, 2015). Work from his most recent manuscript, Crows in Eden,
has appeared in The Kenyon Review and The Common. He has received
a PEN/New England “Discovery” Award, the “Friends of Literature” Prize from Poetry
magazine and the Poetry Foundation, The Rumi Prize in Poetry (Arts &
Letters), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College). Most
recently, he served as Poet-in-Residence at Dartmouth College and The Frost
Place. He lives and teaches in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Acknowledgments
Our artists, for giving so much of themselves to each
project, and the staff and board that support the creation and recording of new
music.
The staff and congregation at our home, The Presbyterian
Church of Chestnut Hill; Rev. Cindy Jarvis, Minister; Daniel Spratlan, Director of Music; Jo Ann West and Esther Cole,
Church Administrators; Ken Lovett, Associate Director of Music.
For housing our artists, Rev. Cindy Jarvis, Viorel and Miki Farcas, David and
Rebecca Thornburgh, Jeff and Liz Podraza, Beth
Vaccaro and Landon Jones, Linda Lipscomb, Colin Dill, Rebecca Siler, Corbin
Abernathy and Andrew Beck, David Newmann and Laura
Ward, Jonathan Blumenfeld.
This recording is made possible through the generosity of
the composers, the Board of Trustees of The Crossing, and a New England
Conservatory Faculty Development Grant.
All photos are of the Quabbin
Reservoir, shot by Gregory W. Brown on a vintage Argoflex
75 camera.
Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.
Philip Blackburn, director, design
Chris Campbell, operations director
Tim Igel,
publicist