Mysterium / Folio / Voyages
Mysterium
Mysterium
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Friday, February 7, 2025 at 7pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
PROGRAM
Folio (2023) – Linda Catlin Smith
–North American Premiere–
Voyages (1993) – Robert Convery
III. Infinite consanguinity it bears
IV. Whose counted smile of hours and days
V. Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime
brief intermission
Mysterium (2024) – Sebastian Currier
–World premiere–
NOTES + TEXTS
Folio
music by Linda Catlin Smith
words of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
A note from the composer:
The texts for this piece are extracted from two books of writings by Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, a selection of her envelope writings (fragments of poetry written on used envelopes) and Open Folios, facsimiles of some of her late writings. These fragments seem to me like Dickinson's thoughts on the way to poems, thoughts to herself; they are mysterious and unusual. When I assembled the texts into the order here, they gave me the feeling of a writer's solitude, ("that unfrequented flower"), sometimes almost despairing, that moves more and more to something like hopefulness. One definition of 'folio' is: "a gathering of loose sheets of paper"; this Folio is a collection of separate lines, or fragments, that were not meant to be together, but are gathered here like a bouquet of disparate flowers.
A great Hope fell
How often foundering at sea
As Branches
Touch the Wind
I have no
Life but this
To lead
It here
Nor any Death but
Lest this
Dispelled
Abased from there
Nor plea
For world
To come
Nor wisdoms
New
Except through
This extent
The loving you -
Withheld -
Deprived from there -
Nor tie to
Expanse -
In this short life
Look back
On time
With kindly
Eyes -
Is there no
Sweet beneath
The sun
With this
That may
Compare -
How cordial is the Mystery
To light and
then return -
But are not
all facts Dreams
— “The Gorgeous Nothings”
Still as the
Stern
Profile of a
Tree against
a winter sky
sunset sky -
evening -
That unfrequented
Flower
Deserving be
Embellish thee
Emerging from
an abyss and
entering it again -
words flowed
softly in like
a shining
secret the Lode
of which the
miner dreams
The haste of early summer
is gone and foreboding leisure
is stealing over bustling things
This has been a beautiful day
— “Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios”
Voyages
music by Robert Convery
words by Hart Crane (1899-1932)
a note from the composer:
Hart Crane’s poem, Voyages is a collection of six lyrical poems that he wrote to his absent lover, a merchant seaman named Emil Opffer. In parts three, four, and five, the speaker in the poem imagines possibilities to sustain him through the pain of their separation, and dreams of his lover’s presence by contemplating the marriage of sea and sky, as well as the bay into which his lover’s ship will eventually sail on its return. With rich imagery, it charts a journey from innocence to a joy shaped by life’s dualities–where pain and beauty intertwine. This journey calls for surrender, a leap of faith that transforms suffering into the discovery of love’s unyielding essence. In the end, Crane presents a vision of joy–resilient, eternal, and illuminated by the depth of experience.
Donald Nally commissioned Voyages as his first major work during his choral directorship at West Chester University in West Chester, PA. Robert Convery was inspired by Hart Crane’s poem, and struck by its intensely beautiful and seemingly incomprehensible imagery.
The piece was written in eight days during the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, in a room carved out of the side of a mountain. It was in the basement of the Teatro Nuovo, a 19th-century opera house. The six movements of Voyages comprise a set of variations. The thematic material for each movement is drawn from the preceding movement. The movements travel in a third-degree harmonic progression, beginning and ending in A Major. These musical considerations were made to correspond to the same kaleidoscopic center, the ever-growing changeability in gaining self-knowledge through the understanding of love, the single theme of Hart Crane’s diversely symbolic cycle of poems.
III.
Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...
IV.
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June—
Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
V.
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade—
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile ... What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed ... “There’s
Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
“—And never to quite understand!” No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
Mysterium
music by Sebastian Currier
words by Robbert Dijkgraaf and Pia de Jong
a note from the composer:
We are surrounded by mystery. As we go about our lives we seldom pause to consider the trillions of celestial bodies that spread out in space on an unimaginable scale. We have named this mysterious expanse “the universe.” We had to call it something. Mysterium, a work for chorus and electronics, is the result of an unusual collaboration between a composer, a physicist, and a writer, that explores the connection between the large and the small, between each of us and the universe. A physicist examines the objective world, while a writer examines the subjective world within. Mysterium captures the realm where these two worlds meet. The universe created us, but then we invented the universe.
The text for Mysterium was created by the renowned Dutch physicist, Robbert Dijkgraaf and his wife, Pia de Jong, a prominent novelist and memoirist. Their two texts are interwoven. Dijkgraaf’s text presents some of the tenets of modern cosmology: the farther out in space we look, the further back in time we see; the universe would not exist if it were not for a fundamental randomness; the elements of our bodies are made from stardust. De Jong’s text by comparison is personal and small-scale. It presents a single personal moment of reflection. She is unpacking a box after their move to America and finds a photograph of when the two of them had just met. It takes her back in time. She thinks about how random things are. If she had not by chance met Robbert that evening, she would not be here unpacking this box in another country. She recalls what Robbert has told her about the fundamental randomness of the world. She has an urge to write her thoughts down.
In the night sky we can see the stars, but there’s much more out there we can’t see. In the 1960’s scientists uncovered a surprising phenomenon: the earth was surrounded by a faint radiation coming from all directions. It became apparent that this radiation was in fact the remnants of light released just after the universe began. This faint signal was in fact a blueprint for the universe. In Mysterium this radiation, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), has been converted into sound waves, a gentle white noise with subtle variations. These electronic sounds surround the chorus, making the inaudible audible.
When we look at the night sky we see back in time. The farther away we look, the further back in time we reach. We see distant galaxies, billions of years ago. Like leafing through an immense book, we read the entire history of the universe, star by star, galaxy by galaxy.
The room is empty, my footsteps sound hollow. The moving boxes are scattered around me. We waited for the end of winter to move, with spring around the corner. We are thousands of miles from the place we used to call home. I unpack the white porcelain teapot, a wedding gift, and pour water in it. I open a box and find a photograph, the very first picture of us together.
The cosmic microwave background surrounds us in all directions. The very first light of all existence. Before, the cosmos was shrouded in darkness. The dense matter captured the light until the universe expanded. Then, like a fog lifting, the light was set free, spreading out everywhere.
The photograph takes me back to when we first met. We drink coffee in a little café. You look so serious with your gold-rimmed glasses. I wear my purple dress. Eagerly we kiss. After the drizzle stops, we watch the stars in the dark night and you tell me their stories. The night sky is so beautiful, but the vastness of the universe frightens me. The universe began with the random movements of the smallest particles. As the cosmos quickly expanded, these tiny fluctuations became the blueprint for all matter. Gravity shaped them into stars and galaxies. The atoms that make up our bodies were forged in violent explosions of distant stars, spreading debris thought the universe. These cosmic ashes formed solar systems, life, and us.
I put the photograph down. I remember you told me how randomness created the universe. How strange. If chance hadn’t brought us together, I wouldn’t be holding this photograph of us, framed in the past. And I would not sleep in your arms tonight. As I unpack the boxes, I tell my young self in the picture, look, it will all work out. With night blue ink I write a poem about our love, you and me, now and then.
Billions of years of cosmic evolution created our minds. Through our eyes, the universe sees itself. We write its history, you and me, star by star, line by line.
We are grateful to those who make The Crossing possible.
TEAM + ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Crossing
Walter Aldrich
Nathaniel Barnett
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw
Micah Dingler
Joanna Gates
Michaël Hudetz
Steven Hyder
Lauren Kelly
Anika Kildegaard
Maren Montalbano
Rebecca Myers
Olivia Prendergast
Daniel Schwartz
Rebecca Siler
Tiana Sorenson
Daniel Spratlan
Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, associate conductor
Naomi Bennett, artistic associate
Shannon McMahon, managing director
Chelsea Lyons, community engagement manager
Katherine DeSimine, administrative assistant
Paul Vazquez, sound designer
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