Rising – Shaw, To The Hands
Caroline Shaw – To The Hands
Sunrise, Monday April 6
In the midst of your hands...
We're back. With a work about hands.
Coffee. Sun. Carpe diem!
The irony of such a work, in these days of hand washing, is not lost on us. In fact, it's a beautiful coincidence that invites us to remember how very genuine it is to hold someone's hand.
Someone.
Caroline Shaw's To the Hands is the most frequently-performed of our more than 100 commissioned works over nearly fifteen years. In it, we can hear her facile composer/performer approach to composition, as an accomplished violinist and singer (most notably with our friends at Roomful of Teeth); the vocal lines fit the voice like folk songs; the string playing like a glove of perfect cut.
A response to Dieterich Buxtehude's 1680 cantata of the same name and written for our project Seven Responses, To the Hands opens with a Prelude of chants based on the 17th-century composer's music. The calmness of these quiet songs is soon broken by an unsettling string pattern which feels as if it is slicing through the previous music, as it builds energy in the second movement toward an explosive declamation of the central question of the work:
what are these wounds in the midst of your hands?
We love to sing this moment. It feels unified, grasping, maybe even desperate - 17th-century music in the bracing re-imagination of a 21st-century composer. It arrives, then turns inward and rethinks its intention. Caroline writes:
It settles finally on an inversion of the question, so that we reflect, "What are these wounds in the midst of our hands?" We notice what may have been done to us, but we also question what we have done and what our role has been in these wounds we see before us.
We begin Week 4 of Rising w/ The Crossing. Holding hands. Wounded.
– The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Note: Caroline has made the score and parts of To the Hands free to all, stating: Let us open our hands to those of others. (What are these wounds, in my hands, and in yours?) Walls are not the answer. We are all creatures.
To the Hands
I. Prelude
II. in medio
music and words by Caroline Shaw, after Zechariah
commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally for Seven Responses
recorded live in concert at the world premiere
June 24, 2016 at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral
with the International Contemporary Ensemble
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
* * *
I.
Prelude: wordless
II.
in medio. in medio.
in medio manuum tuarum
quid sunt plagae istae in medio manuum tuarum
quid sunt plagae istae in medio manuum nostrarum
in the midst. in the midst.
in the midst of your hands
what are those wounds in the midst of your hands
what are those wounds in the midst of our hands
– from Buxtehude's Ad manus (Zechariah 13:6, adapted by the composer, with the addition of "in medio manuum nostrarum" (in the midst of our hands)