The story of Crossing Over (part 1)

 It has been three months since we released Crossing Over.

In the time since the release, I have been deeply moved by personal stories of people who have been touched by our album. Some stories have come from a time of acute personal grief. For others, hearing the music has brought back memories of an intense past experience. These stories have furthered my belief that music has the ability to communicate truths in a visceral way that speaks directly to the heart.

As a thank you to those people who have shared their personal stories, I want to share more about what the album means to me. Over the course of several posts, I will share the progression of Crossing Over, with texts, images, musical impressions, and musical clips.

This first post will take us through the first 10 tracks of Crossing Over, including pieces by Daniel Elder, John Tavener, and Nicolai Kedrov.

My hope is that through sharing more about how the album came to be and what the music means to me and to us, the story it tells will reach and move even more people.

​Why this? Why now?

People who have had near-death experiences have described vivid images of what they saw and felt as they approached what could have been the end of life. We may go through a similar experience as we prepare to leave this world for what, if anything, lies beyond.

​The pieces we have assembled on this album are musical meditations and visions on what that experience of 'crossing over' could be for each of us.

Crossing Over is not meant to be morbid or terrifying – in fact, some of the pieces are profoundly calm and beautiful.

The overall experience of the album is a varied journey that attempts to capture the extremes of emotion that we might feel in a suspended dream state near the end of this part of our journey.

In the inside cover of the album is the first of many gorgeous original polaroid photos by Caleb Nei and Collin Rae of Sono Luminus.

​A low horizon with a focus on the sky, a bit of blur, a hint of light and hope. 

On that page, we introduce our concept:

What awaits us at the end? What will our final hours feel like? What memories will flit through our consciousness? What dreams? What visions? What emotions will we feel? Whose is the last face we will see? What, if anything, will lie beyond?

Crossing Over is a window into our collective imagination, a musical narrative of what our final hours may feel like. 

Perhaps through imagining our last hours on earth, we can better prepare ourselves to face our time when it comes. Perhaps through imagining a fate we all share, we can better understand each other and our common bonds. Perhaps through imagining how we might feel when looking back on our life, we can focus more clearly on what we wish to do with each day that we have.

​Near the end, a vision
​Elegy, Daniel Elder

Our journey begins with Elegy, by American composer Daniel Elder. For us, this piece represents the moment of realization that we may be reaching the end of our mortal life.

Our image from the album notes captures a sense of frailty that this piece conveys, but also with an appreciation of beauty in the world:

Daniel and I talked at length about his vision for the spatial effects in his piece.

Perhaps we are walking into a valley where there is a small group gathered around for a memorial. The terracing of dynamics at the beginning and the end helps create a feeling of motion in and out of a scene. 

Throughout, the altos also create the feeling of a broader space through lingering on after many of the chords cut off. They always linger on the tonic of the chord - perhaps representing the memory of each of us that remains when we are gone?

A gorgeous soprano canon in the middle of the piece hovers above an ethereal texture from the choir, creating the feeling of a transcendent bugle call (from above?) that echoes through time and space. The first soprano voice (Sarah Moyer) is clear and present, while the echoes (Margot Rood and Jessica Petrus) are further away, slightly veiled by distance.

After bursting out of introverted reflection into a moment of thanks, the piece retreats into a final section which Daniel describes as a raw and emotional lament. Odd staccato figures and voice leaps animate sudden pangs of tears, or brief sobs cut short by lack of breath. 

Listen to our recording that Daniel shared on YouTube, which also allows you to follow along with the music:

​In and out of consciousness
Butterfly Dreams, John Tavener

After the prologue of Elegy, John Tavener’s Butterfly Dreams places the choir and listener into a dream state. 

​​I feel the entire piece as a suspended period of pseudo-consciousness – a bit like dreams that you have in the morning when you are beginning to wake up, where you are somewhat aware that you are dreaming, but are able to suspend disbelief and commit to the visions that continue to flit through your mind.

I imagine that many people who reach the end of life may also experience this type of sensation in the final days or hours, in moments where visions of their life past and possibilities of an unknown future float through their mind.

Our image brings to mind these blurred images - without specificity, but full of warmth and color:

​In his own notes, Tavener offered insight into his vision for the piece:

I regard Butterfly Dreams as a sacred work. Native Americans celebrated the pure metaphysics of virgin nature, and insofar as virgin nature is a manifestation of the Logos (the Word of God), Butterfly Dreams is intrinsically a sacred work. The texts are taken from different sources, including Chuang Tse, an Acoman Indian, and a poem written by a young Czech victim of Auschwitz. All the poems share an almost child-like simplicity, and I have tried to reflect this in the music, which should be sung as simply and as naturally as possible.
​

​​​1. Butterfly Dreams based on Chuang Tse

Tavener’s inspirational text for the piece, and text for the first movement, comes from the 4th Century B.C. philosopher Chuang Tse:

“Which am I really? A butterfly dreaming that I am a man, or a man dreaming that I was a butterfly? The answer is neither of these: there were two unreal modifications of the Single Being, of the universal norm, in which all beings in their state are one.”

Tavener’s setting of this existential uncertainty is brilliant in its simple reinforcement of the text. Five voices sing a quite simple figure in the key of G major, and the other five voices sing the same exact figure as a “shadow” canon two beats later.

The message is clear: whether man or butterfly, we are part of the same overall story, though the uncertainty of what we are does create confusion and perhaps even richness in life (demonstrated here by lush chords of choirs whose vertical harmonics do not always line up).

​The overall piece is remarkably slow (quarter note = 40) and marked as “magical and exquisite” which perhaps indicates a true respect and fascination for the central concept…or perhaps just indicates that the person experiencing the emotions of the piece is in a state of REM sleep when his or her heartbeat has slowed considerably. ​

​2. Haiku by Kokku

Over the Dianthus, See.
​ A white butterfly,
whose soul I wonder.

Tavener’s second movement is a touch more literal and concrete. It begins at 60 beats a minute, and up a dynamic level. Perhaps slightly more awake and resting than the first movement. However, it still retains the shadowing effect, indicating that the dream is still present.

In my score I have written “in the air”…I see a very clear image of a beautiful white butterfly hovering over a flower (the Dianthus). ​I think the emotional feeling is: “The butterfly is so beautiful…I wonder what it means? Does it have a soul? Do I have soul? Are we one in the same?”

​3. Haiku by Buson

Butterfly in my hand,
as if it were a spirit,
unearthly, insubstantial

If movement 2 was watching a real butterfly “in the air,” this movement turns a bit more hallucinatory: the butterfly is now sitting “in my hand.” Tavener’s marking “unearthly” reinforces that a moment such as this likely could not be real, but only possible in a dream.

Much of the choir slows to a single C major chord, representing a moment of stillness (the butterfly has momentarily landed), while two parts (the soprano and alto), sing a gorgeously simple duet. ​This two-part harmony still illustrates the duality and oneness of human and butterfly soul – in this instance calmly and beautifully co-existing

​4. Haiku by Issa

The flying butterfly, I feel myself a creature of dust.

After moments of calm, chaotic energy emerges: a cascading 12-part canon paints a sonic picture of a dozen independent butterflies flitting around a garden.

Through 4 repeats, the canon cycles through several modal variations before returning to the original C major figure, perhaps signifying that there are only slight variations in each life, and that each of us eventually returns to the original, universal state.

​Given the intimate connection between humans and butterflies throughout, the movement also illustrates the short and frantic nature of human life before “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

​5. Haiku anon.

It has no voice,
the butterfly, whose dream of flowers
​I fain would hear

After 12 lives quickly flit by in movement 4, we return to a moment of calm in movement 5.

However, it is a disorienting calm.

For the first time in the piece, we hear an extended minor chord. Only the first sopranos sing text – gone are the shadowing effects and duets showing the connection between human and butterfly.

Instead, we experience a moment of solitary uncertainty…the butterfly can’t be heard, all we hear is our own voice, and even it is confusing.

​Tavener’s four different variations of a 4-note melody in 5-beat meter create a feeling of disorienting and foreboding bewilderment. 

​6. The Butterfly by Pavel Friedmann

He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true colour.
And how easily he climbed, and how high.
Certainly, climbing, he wanted
To kiss the last of my world.
I have been here seven weeks. Ghettoized.
Who loved me found me,
Daisies call to me,
And the branches also of the white chestnut in my yard.
But I haven’t seen a butterfly here.
The last one was the last one.
​There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.

In a piece where each movement is a dream, and where many are quite surreal, this is a vivid nightmare. It literally bursts forth out of the quiet, foreboding loneliness of movement 5.

​And not only is it loud, it is jarringly dissonant and incredibly extreme. If the opening sounds like a scream to you, that is not a mistake.

The text itself is by far the most direct and vivid of the set, not written by an ancient Eastern philosopher, but by 21-year old Pavel Friedman in a concentration camp in 1942. Friedman was later deported to Auschwitz, where he died in 1944.

In a piece where the connection between butterfly and man symbolizes a oneness with nature and a universal soul, this poem illustrates a time when that connection was lost in a place utterly devoid of humanity and spirituality.

​7. Butterfly Song from Acoman Indian

Butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly.
Oh, look, see it hovering among the flowers,
It is like a baby trying to walk and not
​knowing how to go.
The clouds sprinkle down the rain.

After the vivid nightmare illustrating a state of separation with the metaphorical butterfly, Tavener offers perhaps his most stunning movement. A simple solo line hovering around the home key of G (the key of the butterfly?) brings to life a solitary and beautiful butterfly hovering in a garden. The Native American text brings back the connection between man and butterfly and also recalls the beauty and simplicity of childhood. To me, it feels like a flashback to our earliest and happiest childhood memories.

​​​
​8. Butterfly Dreams based on Chuang Tse

After three movements of man and butterfly separated, Tavener closes with a recapitulation of his first movement. The music is a carbon copy of the first - a recurring dream. ​After 13 minutes of a highly volatile dream state, we seem to relax back into REM, and the two versions of ourselves become closer to one.

​I believe
Otche Nash, Nicolai Kedrov

After the extended dream state of Butterfly Dreams, our protagonist awakes as we turn to a moment of utter homophony in Kedrov’s simple setting of the most recited of Christian prayers, the Our Father. 

​I believe that for many people nearing the end of life, a moment of familiar prayer must be profoundly comforting as a psychological and emotional preparation for what is to come.

The story of this simple piece makes it even more meaningful at this moment in the album:

The son of a priest, and later in life a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Nikolai Kedrov founded a successful vocal quartet in early twentieth-century Russia that toured Europe performing Russian folk songs, ballads, and liturgical music. After the Revolution of 1917, Kedrov fled to Germany and then later to France, where he re-established his quartet, and focused it more exclusively on Russian Orthodox music. In exile, the quartet continued to perform liturgical chants of the Russian Church, including his contemplatively beautiful Otche Nash.

I can imagine two very valid and different interpretations of this piece:

• Performing it as it would be performed in its liturgical home – a Russian cathedral. With a large choir, octavists (very low basses!) doubling the low bass part, suitably slow, rich, and reverent. This may be how Kedrov envisioned when he composed it. 
• Performing it as a quartet might perform it, thinking of Kedrov’s life and circumstances after the revolution, and how it was performed by his quartet. This interpretation likely carries a slightly faster tempo, may be more limber to allow more breaths, and may be less likely to have an octavist. Perhaps it is more contemplative and imbued with an emotional sense of longing for home.

Given that the piece was composed in 1922 after Kedrov fled Russia, I gravitate towards the latter interpretation. ​When we perform this piece, I think we must think of ourselves as exiles, uncertain if we will ever see our home again...

​Thank you for reading - You can now read Part 2 and Part 3 of this series as well!  Oh, and if you don't yet have your own copy, you can find it on Amazon and iTunes :-)
- Matthew Guard, Artistic Director