House Besieged
IN A HOUSE BESIEGED
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Scott Dettra, organ
recorded
Sunday, March 27, 2022 @ 7pm
St. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
presented by Penn Live Arts
PROGRAM
In A House Besieged
Act 1: not so much watching as waiting
The Memory of Rain (2010) Lansing D. McLoskey
Act 2: holding her hands over her ears
In a House Besieged (2021) Stacy Garrop
— world premiere —
Prologue
I. A Natural Disaster
II. Almost No Memory
III. The Cottages: 2. Lillian
IV. Order
V. In a House Besieged
Epilogue
Commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art,
Tom Welsh, Director of Performing Arts, Music and Film;
with generous support of the Musart Society,
in honor of Robert G. Schneider.
Written for The Crossing, Donald Nally, and Scott Dettra.
This concert recorded for broadcast by our partner WRTI 90.1 FM,
Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz Public Radio Station
NOTES + TEXTS
"We have wanted to work with composer Stacy Garrop for some time. As friends, we’ve watched her ceaseless energy, meeting the demands of an increasingly full commission calendar with ever-evolving creativity. She often writes (with confident expertise) for choir, and she is the type of composer that will learn an unfamiliar instrument as if she were a virtuoso player. I called her and suggested we make a piece for choir and organ on Lydia Davis’ writings."
READ DONALD'S FULL BLOG ON "IN A HOUSE BESIEGED”
The Memory of Rain
music by Lansing McLoskey
words by Philip Levine (1928-2015)
Commissioned by The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor, with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project: premiered at The Month of Moderns 2010, The Crossing’s annual summer festival of new music.
1.
Dawn. First light tearing
at the rough tongues of zinnias,
at the leaves of the just born.
Today it will rain. On the road
black cars are abandoned, but the clouds
ride above, their wisdom intact.
They are predictions. They never matter.
The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs,
black arrowheads trailing their future.
2.
When the night comes small fires go out.
Blood runs to the heart and finds it locked.
Morning is exhaustion, tranquilizers, gasoline,
the screaming of frozen bearings,
the failures of will, the TV talking to itself.
The clouds go on eating oil, cigars,
housewives, sighing letters,
the breath of lies. In their great silent pockets
they carry off all our dead.
3.
The clouds collect until there's no sky.
A boat slips its moorings and drifts
toward the open sea, turning and turning.
The moon bends to the canal and bathes
her torn lips, and the earth goes on
giving off her angers and sighs
and who knows or cares except these
breathing the first rains,
the last rivers running over iron.
4.
You cut an apple in two pieces
and ate them both. In the rain
the door knocked and you dreamed it.
On bad roads the poor walked under cardboard boxes.
The houses are angry because they're watched.
A soldier wants to talk with God
but his mouth fills with lost tags.
The clouds have seen it all, in the dark
they pass over the graves of the forgotten
and they don't cry or whisper.
They should be punished every morning,
they should be bitten and boiled like spoons.
– Philip Levine, “Clouds,” from Ashes, 1979. Used with permission of the author.
In a House Besieged
music by Stacy Garrop
words by Lydia Davis
Commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom Welsh, Director of Performing Arts, Music and Film; with generous support of the Musart Society, in honor of Robert G. Schneider.
Written for The Crossing, Donald Nally, and Scott Dettra.
a note from the composer:
In a House Besieged features several short stories by contemporary American writer Lydia Davis that reflect the fear and anxiety that accompany the aging process. We see our homes and the world around us crumble and decay with time; can we admit that our bodies and minds will do the same? If we are lucky enough to grow old, will we remember who we are?
The piece presents five stories over the course of five movements, each highlighting various aspects of the aging process. Two additional fragments woven between these movements serve as a prologue, a series of interludes, and an epilogue. One fragment consists of the sounds someone makes while trying to recall how to pronounce the word “woman.” The other fragment, when fully heard at the end of the piece, illustrates the rising apprehension a person experiences with the onset and progression of dementia.
–S.G.
Prologue
(from “Suddenly Afraid”) (from “The Busy Road”)
a wa wam I am so used to it
A Natural Disaster (from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
In our home here by the rising sea we will not last much longer. The cold and the damp will certainly get us in the end, because it is no longer possible to leave: the cold has cracked open the only road away from here, the sea has risen and filled the cracks down by the marsh where it is low, has sunk and left salt crystals lining the crack, has risen again higher and made the road impassable.
The sea washes up through the pipes into our basins, and our drinking water is brackish. Mollusks have appeared in our front yard and our garden and we can’t walk without crushing their shells at every step. At every high tide the sea covers our land, leaving pools when it ebbs, among our rosebushes and in the furrows of our rye field. Our seeds have been washed away; the crows have eaten what few were left.
Now we have moved into the upper rooms of the house and stand at the window watching the fish flash through the branches of our peach tree. An eel looks out from below our wheelbarrow.
Interlude
(from “Suddenly Afraid”) (from “The Busy Road”)
a wa wam owm I am so used to it by now
Almost No Memory (from Almost no Memory)
A certain woman had a very sharp consciousness but almost no memory. She remembered enough to get by from day to day.
Sometimes she would only read and think, and sometimes she would make a note in her current notebook of what she was reading in a notebook from an earlier time, or she would make a note of an idea that came to her from what she was reading. (…)
Although most of what she read was new to her, sometimes she immediately recognized what she read and had no doubt that she herself had written it, and thought it. It seemed perfectly familiar to her, as though she had just thought it that very day, though in fact she had not thought it for some years, unless reading it again was the same as thinking it again, or the same as thinking it for the first time, and though she might never have thought it again, if she had not happened to read it in her notebook. And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her.
Interlude
(from “Suddenly Afraid”) (from “The Busy Road”)
a wa wam owm I am so used to it by now
Owamn womn That when the traffic falls silent,
The Cottages: 2. Lillian (from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
I look out from time to time and she is still sitting there alone, and she will not call them for fear of being a nuisance, and because she is disappointed she begins to think as she has thought before that she is too far away, she will not come back to this cottage again though she has come here for so many years, first with her husband, then without her husband, who died between one summer and the next, and she is thinking too how she makes trouble for everyone; well, no one minds! I have told her, but she will never believe that any more than she will uncover her old body to swim in company with the other old people here, and goes down to the lake alone at dawn; and now she puts away her book and her glasses and her shoes untied by the bed, and goes to bed, for it is evening, and she likes to lie and watch the darkness come down into the woods, though tonight, as sometimes before, she does not really watch, or though her eyes rest on the darkening woods, she is not so much watching as waiting, and often, now, feels she is waiting.
Interlude
(from “Suddenly Afraid”) (from “The Busy Road”)
a wa wam owm I am so used to it by now
Owamn womn That when the traffic falls silent,
Order (from Varieties of Disturbance)
All day long the old woman struggles with her house and the objects in it; the doors will not shut; the floorboards separate and the clay squeezes up between them; the plaster walls dampen with rain; bats fly down from the attic and invade her wardrobe; mice make nests in her shoes; her fragile dresses fall into tatters from their own weight on the hanger; she finds dead insects everywhere. In desperation she exhausts herself sweeping, dusting, mending, caulking, gluing, and at night sinks into bed holding her hands over her ears so as not to hear the house continue to subside into ruin around her.
Interlude
Suddenly Afraid (from Varieties of Disturbance)
because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm
Owamn womn
In a House Besieged (from Break it Down)
In a house besieged lived a man and woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.
Epilogue
The Busy Road (from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
I am so used to it by now
That when the traffic falls silent,
I think a storm is coming.
–Texts by Lydia Davis. Excerpted or used in full; they are taken from the following short stories: "Suddenly Afraid," "The Busy Road," "A Natural Disaster," "Almost No Memory," "The Cottages: 2. Lillian," "Order," and "In a House Besieged.” Used with permission.
Team
The Crossing
Katy Avery
Nathaniel Barnett
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw
Danielle Buonaiuto
Colin Dill
Micah Dingler
Joanna Gates
Dimitri German
Dominic German
Steven Hyder
Anika Kildegaard
Chelsea Lyons
Maren Montalbano
Rebecca Myers
Daniel O'Dea
Daniel Schwartz
Rebecca Siler
Tiana Sorenson
Daniel Spratlan
Elisa Sutherland
Daniel Taylor
Jason Weisinger
Shari Wilson
Scott Dettra, organ
Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor
John Grecia, keyboards
Paul Vazquez, sound designer
Jonathan Bradley, executive director
Shannon McMahon, operations manager
Jesse Kudler, grants manager
Elizabeth Dugan, bookkeeper
The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artists Management