Rising – Fowler, Breath
Paul Fowler – Breath
Sunrise, Wednesday May 13
Settling into midweek.
Looking at the Summer months ahead.
Yesterday, a brief work referencing Spring.
Today, a work of greater length, referencing Summer.
A broader landscape.
A trip to the mountains.
Paul Fowler’s Breath is based on a (truly amazing) poem of Philip Levine, who once told us how this poem came to him, hiking in the mountains above Fresno, staring into streambeds, thinking about his wife.
I woke
scared by the gasping
of a wild one, scared
by my own breath, and
slowly calmed
remembering your weight
beside me all these
years
Paul, too, hikes in the mountains, above Boulder. It’s as if the two had a conversation through hiking, in silences stretching hundreds of miles across the Southwest. A conversation that asked, “What does all this (not just the rocks, but the feelings they stir) sound like?”
Paul writes:
The work was influenced by the difference between the ever-present sound of people (in cities) and the ever-present sound of nature (elsewhere), focusing on the latter – the sounds of wind, waves, and rivers. The environmental aspect led me to create also an environment of sound, based on a kind of running, rolling river-like language.
Who hears the humming
of rocks at great height,
the long steady drone
of granite holding together,
the strumming of obsidian
to itself?
We love to sing Breath because the journey is long and it has many crevices we must navigate, many streams to traverse. It moves in many directions and makes demands on us that are equal parts technical and emotional. Yet, when we reach “the almond blossom moment” (a moment of complete ensemble agreement; we smile, sadly), the world becomes still; there is just a simple hymn that reframes all that came before it.
It’s like remembering memory.
Something we knew, long ago.
Something that made us better.
If feels right.
I give you
almond blossoms
for your hair, your hair
that will be white, I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.
Hey, when we figure this thing out, let’s go for a walk in the woods together.
A long walk, with lots of people, holding hands.
Quietly making room for the songs of the rocks and the flowers.
Knowing we don’t need to say what we’re thinking.
Everyone will understand.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Breath
music by Paul Fowler
words by Philip Levine, from They feed they lion
recorded live in concert at Reprise 1,
October 18, 2015 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
originally composed for The Levine Project @ The Crossing in 2010
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
video art by Dan Cole
* * *
Who hears the humming
of rocks at great height,
the long steady drone
of granite holding together,
the strumming of obsidian
to itself? I go among
the stones stooping
and pecking like a
sparrow, imagining
the glacier’s final push
resounding still. In
a freezing mountain
stream, my hand opens
scratched and raw and
flutters strangely,
more like an animal
or wild blossom in wind
than any part of me. Great
fields of stone
stretching away under
a slate sky, their single
flower the flower
of my right hand.
Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything. I
slept alone and dreamed
of you in an old house
back home among
your country people,
among the dead, not
any living one besides
yourself. I woke
scared by the gasping
of a wild one, scared
by my own breath, and
slowly calmed
remembering your weight
beside me all these
years, and here and
there an eye of stone
gleamed with the warm light
of an absent star.
Today
in this high clear room
of the world, I squat
to the life of rocks
jeweled in the stream
or whispering
like shards. What fears
are still held locked
in the veins till the last
fire, and who will calm
us then under a gold sky
that will be all of earth?
Two miles below on the burning
summer plains, you go
about your life one
more day. I give you
almond blossoms
for your hair, your hair
that will be white, I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.