Rising – Spears, The Tower and The Garden
Gregory Spears – “In the Land of Shinar”
from The Tower and The Garden
Sunrise, Tuesday March 17
Everybody up!
Following on the fragile intimacy of yesterday's Rising, this morning brings a work of relentless energy that draws on the amazing pressure music can build up over time. (It's so fascinating that music can sometimes make us feel compelled to keep going!) We love singing this work because it's a carefully woven fabric of small events that relies on everyone - the string quartet, the many divided voice parts, the soloists - to fit exactly where they belong. To both act and react with extraordinary precision. And, it's really fun, even if the subject is one of imminent collapse under such pressure.
In The Tower and the Garden, Greg Spears indulges his interest in juxtapositions and paradoxes, placing abreast the dangers of technological hubris (the tower) and the need for a place of refuge (the garden) in a world threatened by war and ecological disaster. (How is that, in a time like this, everything seems written for this time?)
"In the Land of Shinar" (the second movement of four) explodes in sounds and waves, as Greg captures the raw force Denise Levertov's astoundingly assembled words. Poet and composer combine energies in this meditation on the Tower of Babel, addressing the tendency for technology in our age to serve only its own growth, while potentially destroying our lives in the bargain.
with icy brilliance the dense shade, when all the
immense
weight of this wood and brick and stone and metal
and massive
weight of dream and weight of will
will collapse
"In the Land of Shinar" is a great example of music's ability to describe a subject and, simultaneously, our reaction to the subject. And, the mantra within?
rises and rises....
Rising, with The Crossing.
We really love singing together.
–The Whole Team @ The Crossing
The Tower and the Garden
Mvt. 2 "In the Land of Shinar"
music by Gregory Spears
text by Denise Levertov
recorded in concert October 27, 2018
at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
commissioned by The Crossing and Donald Nally, Cantori New York, Notre Dame Vocale, and Volti
with funding provided by The Ann Stookey Fund for New Music
* * *
Each day the shadow swings
round from west to east till night overtakes it,
hiding
half the slow circle. Each year
the tower grows taller, spiralling
out of its monstrous root-circumference, ramps and
colonnades
mounting tier by lessening tier the way a searching
bird of prey wheels and mounts the sky, driven
by hungers unsated by blood and bones.
And the shadow lengthens, our homes nearby are
dark
half the day, and the bricklayers, stonecutters,
carpenters bivouac
high in the scaffolded arcades, further and further
above the ground,
weary from longer and longer comings and goings.
At times
a worksong twirls down the autumn leaf of a
phrase, but mostly
we catch
only the harsher sounds of their labor itself, and
that seems only
an echo now of the bustle and clamor there was
long ago
when the fields were cleared, the hole was dug, the
foundations laid
with boasting and fanfares, the work begun.
The tower, great circular honeycomb, rises and
rises and still
the heavens
arch above and evade it, while the great shadow
engulfs
more and more of the land, our lives
dark with the fear a day will blaze, or a full-moon
night defining
with icy brilliance the dense shade, when all the
immense
weight of this wood and brick and stone and metal
and massive
weight of dream and weight of will
will collapse, crumble, thunder and fall,
fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow.
-"In the Land of Shinar" from Evening Train by Denise Levertov (1992). Used with permission.