Music in Time: The Street

JOHN KENNEDY, DIRECTOR AND HOST

THE STREET

14 Meditations on the Stations of the Cross

Artists

Composer Nico Muhly

Librettist Alice Goodman

Narrator Marcus Amaker Harp Parker Ramsay

Members of the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus Emily Tiberi Luciana Piovan Allison Deady Kaitlyn Tierney Aaron McKone Gabriel Hernandez Andrew Stack David Drettwan

ST. MATTHEW’S LUTHERAN CHURCH

June 7, 5:00pm

1 hour, 15 minutes Performed without an intermission

Please find texts on page TK.

This performance is made possible in part through funds from the Spoleto Festival USA Endowment, generously supported by BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

The Street is of great personal importance to me, as working with Alice Goodman and Nico Muhly has brought together multiple strands in my life as a musician. Although I’m a harpist, the great bulk of my training was in organ and sacred music at King’s College, Cambridge, and Oberlin Conservatory. Indeed, in high school and college, I nerded out about Byrd masses or obsessively practiced extended cycles by Olivier Messiaen, La Nativité du Seigneur, L’Ascension, and Messe de la Pentecôte. But thanks to a close friend, I also got hooked on 20th-century opera, becoming obsessed with John Adams and Alice Goodman’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. And so, collaborating with Nico and Alice on this work has been a fantastic project in symbiosis of sorts, as they are at once fluent in sacred music of yore and living artistic lives in the realms of new and contemporary music. Nico’s beautifully idiomatic writing fuses with Alice’s arresting and beautiful texts, bearing witness to a meeting of musical worlds—or perhaps one world where these differing worlds are not so disparate as we might assume.

— Parker Ramsay

Composer’s Note

The Stations of the Cross is a sequence of 14 images portraying Jesus’s itinerary on Good Friday, beginning with him being condemned to death and ending with him being laid in the tomb. It’s a surprisingly non-mystical text; there are no miracles or divine interventions. Instead, it’s a series of very earthly actions: encountering the citizens of Jerusalem, falling over three times, encountering his mother, being mocked by soldiers. I find this a deeply relatable way to engage with Holy Week; it doesn’t require a deep knowledge of theology to understand the meaning (although it doesn’t hurt); it’s a way to engage on a human level.

The Street is a set of meditations on the 14 Stations of the Cross, scored for solo harp. Each movement can, in some performances, be paired with plainchant, chosen to augment and, in some cases, provide counterpoint to the traditional narrative of Good Friday. The spark for each movement is original texts by Alice Goodman—either read aloud or read in silence—which are simultaneously specific, evocative, mysterious, and poetic. Often, a single line will provide the starting point for the music: When Jesus is condemned to death (Station I), Goodman describes the crowd shouting “crucify him” as: “the pitch dropping as it passes where you stand.” The harp, in turn, plays a modern version of the same, a kind of digital-delay effect, where the pitch creeps down the scale. This two-note descending motif becomes the governing gesture of the piece.

“Remember the carpenter’s work” (II) suggests an honest, folksy labor—work done with the hands. Mary, come to Jerusalem “to be seen in that first look between mother and child,” hears the echo of a rocking-song from three decades before (IV). Veronica, looking at her sudarium (VI), notices that “He is printed in molecules of blood and sweat,” and hears a chord, diffused and delicate, as if seen under a microscope. A narrator—all of us, perhaps—causes Jesus’s second fall: “My fault. I put out my foot and tripped him. What can I say?” and the harp responds with a bullying, rhythmically intense unbroken set of shifting, stumbling gestures (VII). Other stations of the cross take their musical cues from the attendant plainchant, most explicitly heard in station VIII, when Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, and we hear the chant Filiæ Jerusalem played by bell-like harp harmonics. Although Goodman’s texts are never themselves sung, they often suggest lyrical writing which itself could be sung: the line “However low I fall, let me not fall far from you” (IX) engenders a little tune which haunts the final five movements.

The “rich, ferrous smell of blood” encourages the harp to play the instrument with a guitar pick: a small little hand-tool, brittle and sharp. After Jesus’s death (XII), the music becomes simpler, almost businesslike. Goodman avoids the eclipses, rending of the veil of the temple and earthquakes, and asks: “Isn’t it enough that he died?” As Joseph, Nicodemus, and Peter take down the body from the cross, and prepare the burial ritual, the music becomes simpler still, built on a simple drone on middle C: it’s going through the motions, but somehow transformed into something uneasy. Goodman ends her meditations with the mourner’s kaddish (XIV), performed just before the appearance of the first star in the sky (per Jewish law), and the harp, having played a kind of transformed cradlesong, fast forwards an hour, and ends with a vision of the night sky.

— Nico Muhly

Artists

MARCUS AMAKER (narrator) is the first Poet Laureate of Charleston, South Carolina, and the recipient of a Governor’s Arts award. He is also an Academy of American Poets fellow, the graphic designer of a music journal, an electronic musician, and an opera librettist. He frequently visits classrooms to lead poetry workshops. His poetry has been recognized by The Washington Post; The Kennedy Center; American Poets Magazine; The Washington National Opera; NPR; The Chicago Tribune; PBS Newshour; and many others. Amaker’s work is included on a Grammy-nominated opera album. His ninth book, Black Music Is, is from Free Verse Press.

ALICE GOODMAN (librettist) was born in 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and attended the Boston University School of Theology. Goodman was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 2001 and a priest in 2003. In 2011, Goodman was named Rector of Fulbourn and the Wilbrahams in the Diocese of Ely. She has written libretti for operas including Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) with John Adams; and The Magic Flute translated for Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1991). Some of her other works include A Letter of Rights (cantata, with Tarik O’Regan, 2015); Le Roman de Fauvel (with Benjamin Bagby and Peter Sellars, 2022); History is Our Mother: Three Libretti (NYRB Classics, 2017); and The Street (with Nico Muhly, 2022).

NICO MUHLY (composer) is an American composer who writes orchestral music and works for the stage, chamber music, and sacred music. He has received commissions from the Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011) and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; The Australian Chamber Orchestra; the Tallis Scholars; and King’s College, Cambridge. An avid collaborator, he has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied, Justin Peck, and Kyle Abraham and artists Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake, and Paul Simon. Recordings of his work have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community.

PARKER RAMSAY (harp) creates work that is unique in its integration of contemporary music and historical performance and defies easy categorization. In 2020, his “relentlessly beautiful” (WQXR) recording of his transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the King’s College, Cambridge, label attracted international attention and critical praise. Recent and upcoming projects include collaborations with composers Marcos Balter, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Josh Levine; residencies at IRCAM in Paris; and release of his second solo album. Additionally, Ramsay is a prolific writer on music for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Van Magazine.

THE SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA CHORUS is a new professional choir, led by Festival Director of Choral Activities Joe Miller, that builds upon the Festival’s longstanding tradition of exceptional choral music. The Festival Chorus consists of more than 50 vocal fellows with broad and versatile skillsets. Each season, vocal fellows perform major choral works; serve as the choir for Spoleto’s mainstage operas, with select singers covering both large and small roles; and take part in special projects or smaller ensemble works.