Sunrise, July 6
Up, up!
Caffeine...
Let’s go!
We are back.
Rested.
Re-energized.
Determined.
How to return after a month of silence?
How to rise together?
Literally, metaphorically?
Together.
Rising w/ The Crossing began at the Winter Equinox and cantered into Summer, as the days grew longer and longer. In our pause, the Solstice has come and gone; now, though the hot days and warm nights create the illusion of stasis, we are again losing light with each day, as we head toward the Fall Equinox and pass once more through equal parts light and dark. (Praise the axis on which we turn! It gives us the seasons by which we count our lives. It may even have made life possible.)
That’s our goal: Equinox. We’re headed there in this second series, Rising w/ The Crossing. We’re not galloping as we were during March’s urgency; we’re not crawling as we were during June’s weariness. We’ve reset the step, just striding along, headed somewhere:
Rising w/ The Crossing: Equinox Lope
Rising w/ The Crossing was born of absence –
an effort to fill the hole left in our hearts,
our calendars,
our lives
where singing was meant to be.
Filling in the absence – a natural, futile human thing. Bonhoeffer wrote about it from prison:
There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it.
There’s that word: connect.
We wanted desperately to connect, so when we started Rising w/ The Crossing Series 1 (on March 16) we chose individual works from our
live
concert archive – the closest thing we could imagine to sitting in a room together, rife with all the drama of live performance:
the surprise of sudden dynamic explosions,
the seduction of harmonic twists,
the mesmerizing focus of repetition,
the moment that a difficult passage ‘on the edge of not-happening’ happens,
solos that come from one corner of the ensemble, then the next and the next,
resolute faces,
grief-stricken faces,
triumphant faces,
hard-working faces,
deep, company silences,
ambient noises that become a part of the piece,
agreement,
the ashram of the concert hall,
colors and colors and colors.
Now, in Series 2, we want to do more...and less.
We thought hard about what Rising w/ The Crossing means, four months into COVID-Time, deep into Summer, headed to Autumn. We’ve decided to Rise together just once per week, with a far more substantial listening experience –
entire
concerts, expanded through spoken notes and heard in the original broadcasts as they played on our partner station WRTI.* Curiously, the commentary turns the programs into a museum of the time, with the perspective of the group from a distance of two, three, or four years ago – a perspective that allows us to see not just what the idea was behind the programming – the story we’re trying to tell – but also to see just how quickly time moves and perspectives change, or how often we repeat ourselves and time seems to stand still.
We had our reservations about this. A concert is an odyssey, a journey that rises and falls over the course of an evening. There are vagaries that pass by nearly unnoticed, quickly superseded by triumphs. But, we listened to many of these full concert broadcasts and we were struck by a common characteristic: that of a community of people “overcoming.” A bonding together, facing all those moments we cannot get back, collecting the good ones, banking them till they build up in energy and confidence to a baffling whole – not greater than the parts summed, but deeper.
You can hear that in our first Rising w/ The Crossing: Equinox Lope, July 6. ‘the national anthems,’ featuring The Crossing and the strings of the International Contemporary Ensemble in works of Caroline Shaw, Ted Hearne, and David Lang. We think it’s a great way to launch Series 2, on the heels of Independence Day, discussing what makes a nation: its immigrants (in Caroline’s To the Hands), its language (in Ted’s Consent), its fears (in David’s the national anthems), and absence (in Ted’s What it might say). In fact, starting off with Consent, a work that can be challenging to singers and confounding to listeners for its many-times-overlaid text, reels just right – a conflation of two clichés summing up Equinox Lope: back in the saddle, diving head first into the deep end. Our notes give lots of background on this and more @
www.
crossingchoir.org/nationalanthems-notes
.
So, since we’ll only be ‘connecting’ once per week, these intros may be a bit longer – we may linger. (Bonhoeffer, has some good words on that too):
... the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation.
The investment is definitely more substantial for everyone; longer listening, speculative texts, lots of program notes...maybe to spread out over the week, or to treat some evening as a concert? Unlike the archived works of Series 1, the concerts of Equinox Lope will be live for just a week, replaced with a new entry each Monday morning at sunrise.
Grappling with separation, we try again to say “good morning” together,
to smile, remember, and anticipate together,
to connect.
...gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.
Be well. Be grateful. Be safe.
We miss you.
Love from,
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Next week, less about the series, more about the music!
Quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
Letters and Papers from Prison
(1943-1945),
published posthumously in 1951.
* Special thanks to Joe Patti, Tyler McClure and the Team at WRTI: 90.1 FM Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz Public Radio
* * *
