violin, cello, electric guitar, harmonium/organ
audio ︎
pamphlet ︎
Premiered by Conrad Harris, violin; John Popham, cello; Anthony Vine, electric guitar; and Steve Long, harmonium at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church.
the ancient greek verb muo, meaning to cover or veil the eyes or mouth, forms the adjective mustikós, meaning secret or mystic. muo can also refer to what lies just beneath something, such as mus, meaning muscle, tissue under the skin, as well as musterion, or mystery, that which lies beyond explanation or perception. from muo also comes mustes, referring to those initiated into sacred mysteries, as well as the noun mousa, or muse, and in turn, mousikos, meaning devoted to the muses, specifically music.
the visible and temporal is a manifestation of the invisible and eternal
what the mystic and musician share is a tacit receptivity to the cosmic nature of the imagination, an invisible realm no smaller than the universe itself, whose limitlessness is glimpsed with every vision and song, each a speck in the firmament of the mind.
“o fragile human, ashes of ashes, and filth of filth! say and write what you see and hear... not by a human invention, and not by the requirements of human composition, but as you see and hear them on high in the heavenly places in the wonders of god.”
hildegard von bingen (1098-1179) heard these words in one of her mystic visions. the ‘living light,’ as she called it, appeared to her in childhood, but only in middle age, and likely more assured to embrace the spiritual virtues of her uncanny abilities, did she begin to write down her revelations. her visions contain surreal and esoteric imagery, like apparitions covered in eyes and whirlwinds of cinders, counterbalanced with well-reasoned interpretations of the theological symbols and allegories embedded within.
...i saw a vast instrument, round and shadowed, in the shape of an egg, small at the top, large in the middle and narrowed at the bottom; outside it, surrounding its circumference, there was bright fire with, as it were, a shadowy zone under it...
in her third vision, the universe appeared to hildegard as an oblong form made of enfolding layers of fire, water, ether, light, and rock, each representing christian tenets, from incarnation to faith, with the overall egg-like structure symbolizing omnipotence. the story of the cosmic egg is archetypal, appearing across many cultures as a container which orders, protects, and incubates the volatile primordial forces of creation.
“o human, who receives these things meant to manifest what is hidden not in the disquiet of deception but in the purity of simplicity, write, therefore, the things you see and hear.”
what drew me to the cosmic egg was its accompanying illumination, a beautiful and peculiar painting of a mandorla, fringed with feathery yellow flames spilling beyond its border, containing a botanical universe of flowery stars and vegetal flames with an orifice at its center containing a gray tongue topped by the sun and moon. seeing it, i felt a circle had just closed. the music i was writing, based on strains of hildegard’s symphonies, resonated with the image of the egg. i don’t understand why. if i did, i would not be interested in it! what is unknown, like the dark interior of a shell, seems to nurture creation.
...the visions i saw i did not perceive in dreams, or sleep, or delirium, or by the eyes of the body, or by the ears of the outer self, or in the hidden places; but i received them while awake and seeing with a pure mind and the eyes and ears of the inner self, in open places, as god willed it. how this might be is hard for mortal flesh to understand.
the cosmic egg recasts a short salutation within hildegard’s music. two complementary lines of chant, an invocation before a larger body of verses, are reduced and made wordless. throughout, the four musicians trace these lines, beginning together, then moving from note to note independently, making individualized choices about duration, phrasing, and pitch that cause the lines to splay apart and radiate into ever-changing forms. as the oneness of chant fuses with the perpetual cycle of creation, these sung lines drift out of time and dematerialize into harmonics, becoming more like the after-sound of chant, the innumerable reflections that follow from each sound, a sonorous plane extended by the vaulted ceilings and hard surfaces of ecclesiastical architecture, allowing the sounds that propagate beyond the bowing of a string or humming of an organ to have more room to express themselves agentially, to shimmer without human hands.