Rising – Boyle, Voyages
Benjamin C.S. Boyle – Voyages, Cantata No. 2, Op. 41
Sunrise, Monday March 23
Love.
We're back. Grab your coffee. Let's jump right into the "Why." Why we love to sing this piece: "Descent: meticulous, infrangible, and lonely," from Benjamin C.S. Boyle's Voyages, Cantata No. 2, Op. 41, setting Hart Crane's odyssey of the same name – an odyssey that journeys through a relationship to its inexorable destiny. In this fifth movement we are well along in that journey: after a brief, fragile string introduction in which it feels like each line is blown of the thinnest glass, ready to crumble from sound itself, we enter singing in two choirs. Like lovers in the dark, one choir follows closely the other's lead, occasionally finding ourselves synchronized. Those simultaneities – how our horizontal phrases align vertically – create moment after moment of the most bittersweet music we know – moments that, like love, vanish into time/space, no matter how hard we try to hold the feeling or suspend the ticking clock. All becomes memory. (Lingering seems to be a theme @ Rising!) Soon, the choirs align, then rest, and return – now, following at a greater distance. Though we finish each other's sentences and reach an extraordinary apogee, we do so in words that already betray our resignation:
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. Oh, Hart. And music. And people.
You awake yet?
Friday we took a momentary detour to some 'studio recorded' music, but here @ Rising, we want to stick mainly to live performance. Singing together, with our friends listening, is what we're really missing. So, there's that type of Love – the "I find Love in a room full of people singing and listening to each other" – and then there's the infinite other types, one of which is "push back" Love. We admit, choosing Love today is a response to vitriol flying about us like oh so many viruses. That's why we've added the sixth and final movement of Voyages, as an alternative to all that:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
Tomorrow we'll hear another setting of the same text – and celebrate the imagination! The different perspectives through which we experience Life. And Love.
Be well.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Voyages, Cantata No. 2, Op. 41
V. Descent: Meticulous, infrangible, and lonely
VI. Chorale: Draw in your head
music by Benjamin C.S. Boyle
text by Hart Crane
recorded in concert at The Month of Moderns
June 17, 2018 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally
with the generous support of Pamela Prior and Debra Reinhard
dedicated to Lindsey Reinhard.
* * *
V. Descent: Meticulous, infrangible, and lonely
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade–
–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.
VI. Chorale: Draw in your head
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.
–Hart Crane (1899-1932), abbreviated and rearranged by the composer