This Other Spring

Shake off thy sloth & a tribute to Meredith Monk

The second “single” (?) from The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford’s album of all the music I’ve written for them is out today, and is available in all the obvious places.

A little backstory! One of the most beautiful pieces of music in the world is Meredith Monk’s Fat Stream, from her album Key (1971). I think about this music all the time.

The Thing that so many of us have been trying to do is something she figured out in the Nixon administration: how to create unspeakably, almost impossibly, beautiful things out of a combination of so-called extended techniques, deployed with grace, humor, severity, and delicacy in equal measure. Every time you go to the “spooky noises from the mezzo and spookier noises from the small ensemble” concert (or monodrama), please remember that Meredith has been doing this work for ages; you ignore her catalogue at your own peril!

I made an arrangement of Fat Stream for the San Francisco Symphony, because I realized that I could be an evangelist for the piece without deploying my normal tactic of forcing people to listen to it at the dinner table or sending 34,587 links and texting “did u listen 2 it” and “how about now” every three minutes.

When I was writing This Other Spring for Magdalen (text at the end of the post), I found myself haunted by her music — not just Fat Stream, but other works for ensemble as well. I think you would be hard-pressed to locate any explicit “stylistic” relationship between these two musics, but I think it’s always interesting to look at what’s buried underneath. Here, the canons and the spacing of the organ chords come from Stravinsky and Monk:

And this part from Vessel Suite (start around 2 minutes in if the link doesn’t take you there) definitely informed some of the more ecstatic canons, with their unidiomatic (not in terms of technique but in terms of “things normally sung in the Chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford) repeating jumping sixths.

The piece ends with the same chords as the beginning transposed up a semitone, and then concludes finally with three abstracted little iambs which, in my mind, try to summon a memory of hearing Meredith’s music.

The performance instructions on the last page towards the bottom read: “These final three gestures could be sung by one singer per line, but some poetry might be found in using nine soloists; an example might be to start with the most senior member of the choir and to end with the most junior.”f

Shake off thy Sloth, my drowsy Soul, awake;
With Angels sing
Unto thy King,
And pleasant Music make;
Thy Lute, thy Harp, or else thy Heart-strings take,
And with thy Music let thy sense awake.
See how each one the other calls
To fix his Ivy on the walls.
Transplanted there it seems to grow
As if it rooted were below:
Thus He, who is thy King,
Makes Winter, Spring.

Thomas Traherne, On Christmas Day¹

1. I really wish I could have gotten away with setting the first stanza, which begins:

Shall Dumpish Melancholy spoil my Joys
While Angels sing
And Mortals ring
My Lord and Saviour's Praise?
Awake from Sloth, for that alone destroys;
'Tis Sin defiles, 'tis Sloth puts out thy Joys.

…but that, like many texts from that time, have some words which have changed in meaning…