Crosses

For Choir SSAATTBB

The text setting of my new piece Crosses comes from a recently published collection of Paul J. Pastor, entitled The Locust Years. The collection draws on a difficult period he went through some years ago, and the reflection on the strangeness of how our most profound experiences of hardship are often the places where we come to the deepest awareness of what love is. Paul puts it this way: ‘all love is a form of intimately personal death; and that is it's gift.’ The poem ‘Crosses’ delves into this reality in a unique way, considering the way in which, no matter where we look in life, the Cross is inscribed into all things – our work, our dreams, our relationships, even ourselves. The poem is a meditation, as Paul says, upon ‘the heavy and wonderful burdens we carry because of love, and the ways in which those burdens become both doom and gift for us.’

In my setting, I started with the idea that each phrase of the poem (‘The carpenter’s was made of wood’, ‘The lover’s cross is made of love’, etc.) is like a textual station of the cross. As such, I wanted each of them to have a sense of being a complete phrase in themselves, even while also having connectedness and development over time – repeated figures, themes, harmonies, etc. The text starts with the most particular of things – a literal wooden cross – and eventually concludes on in the most cosmic of scales: ‘all we see.’ As such, the music, which is more homophonic toward the beginning, opens up and becomes increasingly contrapuntal as the piece goes on.

Harmonically, this piece is a journey into musical tenebrism, drawing on strong contrasts between dark and light textures while maintaining high clarity of sound. The harmony is crafted to feel like a perpetual descent that nonetheless remains anchored to transcendent heights, like Escher’s paradoxical drawing ‘Relativity.’ This puts a special emphasis on the lower voices, who, especially in the second bass, are prevailed upon to provide a strong fundamental multiple times throughout to anchor the warmth and richness of the harmony. Lines in various voices circle around and through the harmony, both ascending and descending, gilding longer held suspensions with figures in triplets and quavers as if something being lain upon the form of the music.

My hope is that through this piece, the listener experiences that strange, lingering love and hope that can only come through the crosses we choose to bear.