On July 17th, The Crossing will premiere my newest choral piece. They commissioned the work as part of the Levine Project, scores based on the poetry of Philip Levine. The rehearsal process has been the best I've experienced up to this point. Donald Nally is quite the phenomenal conductor, and has an incredible set of ears. His choir is a great joy to work with; it is customary that this sort of thing usually requires a bit of tweaking to get right, and it's not taken that much tweaking. So either, I've finally cracked the bolt on clear notation, or the choir is just absurdly brilliant (methinks it's the latter). This is a really long work (for choir), 15 minutes, and it's acapella, which is extra-special-taxing. I tried to keep the ranges for the singers pretty easy, to accommodate the length of the work. Furthermore, it's a conducting challenge due to a consistent shifting of meter.

At the outset of the composition of this piece I decided to use Levine's syllabic meter as the meter for the piece. It has a rolling quality, and I thought it would impose a nice variant on the musicality of the work if it followed Levine's prose rather than getting locked into a 4/4 or 3/4 or something like it. In the text below, the line is written with the number of syllables in parenthesis at the end of the line:

Who hears the humming (5)
of rocks at great height, (5)
the long steady drone (5)
of granite holding together, (8)
the strumming of obsidian (8)
to itself? (3)

So my meter for the setting of this first complete thought is 5/8 - 5/8 - 5/8 - 4/4 - 4/4 - 3/8. And this repeats until we reach the final word: "itself". Needless to say, it requires a lot of the musicians to count in a constantly shifting tempo and still bring out a musical performance. (And The Crossing does splendidly). Here is one full round of the pattern:



Breath Ex.1

The other thing you'll notice about this example is that there's an eighth note "motor" underlying the material. When I chose this poem there was a sound of river water and wind running through my mind – thus the watery flow through the piece.

It's in 3 large sections, following Levine's stanzas. The first is about the awe of nature, both as a part of it, and as a witness. The second section explores darkness and loss:

Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything.

Breath Ex. 2

The poet has a nightmare about his wife, where she is the sole living being amongst her "country people". The musical material begins with strong rising and falling gestures, like being caught in a wave of fear. And the choir breaks into aleatory at the end of the phrases. Upon the dream taking hold, there is a superimposition of meter (on top of Levine's meter) – a rocking or lulling 3/4. The poet wakes, and is reminded of his love and the comfort in loving his wife.

The final stanza is the classic summation of the two previous explorations. The poet ruminates on nature and its grandiose power, and how we rest in it. The musical material returns from the first section of the piece. The final emotional space is of tenderness. The poet offers almond blossoms to his wife, and offers his breath to the world.

I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.

Breath Ex. 3

Links:

Levine discusses "Breath" with the conductor, Donald Nally:



Donald Nally interviews Lansing Mcloskey and me, regarding the Levine Project: