ARTIST STATEMENT
I discovered the Novgorod Codex in 2017. Here was this book, made by a Ukrainian monk in 999 A.D. hurrying to save his culture from religious destruction by literally pouring thoughts into layers of wax, buried in the mud after the town crumbled, unearthed by a Russian scholar (Andrei Zaliznyak) painstakingly putting the text back together letter by letter, exactly 1,000 years later when these same things are happening all over again. The story was almost too rich. Too relevant. I couldn’t help but work with it.
I got in touch with Donald Nally (the Crossing’s director) about my plans for what became The Book of Never , and he resonated with it. I’d been collaging historical sources for a few years by then, but this was gonna be a lot bigger. I’d dig up the hymns and psalms from the codex, put them inside digital simulations of infinitely-large imaginary cathedrals, cut up that sound and glue it back together with individual words and phrases from the Novgorod Codex. It ended up taking years, and by then it need ed more contemporary words from writers living in their own kinds of exile Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, and interview with Angela Davis (by way of the Rolling Stones’ song “Sweet Black Angel”), Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, Gertrude Stein’s Descriptions of Literature, and the list goes on.
When we workshopped bits of the music with the choir in 2018, Donald and I immediately knew we had something really powerful. Afterwards I wrote to him:
The music has bitter anger. It needs it. Or maybe I need it there. Lots of us probably need it. Not the anger, but a place for it to go.
In bringing other people to the music, there might be connections between this Ukrainian monk and…choose any number of people whose voices have recently been erased and written over by someone whose beliefs they didn’t share. In fact, that’s one of my hopes.
All kinds of people, especially people who don’t share my own beliefs, might see their own relationship between the past and the right-in-our-faces present. I hope it’ll be a complicated one. So the anger I feel doesn’t become their anger. So instead it can dissolve my anger with their own feelings and make a solution that’s more useful to everyone. An antidote maybe.
I like what playwright Bertolt Brecht once said…
“When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”
Let’s not give up.
Of course this was all before the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, before the pandemic even, so it only got more and more relevant through the years we spent on it. Maybe it’s because I’m a C-SPAN junkie and I could feel it in the air. Or maybe it was just coincidence.
There was another coincidence, the saddest and probably the most personal one for me. I started writing this music on December 18, 2017 . Later I learned that the same week, halfway around the world in Russia, Andrei Zaliznyak died before he could complete his work reconstructing the words of the Novgorod Codex. I’d wanted to contact him. To share a beer and talk with him about the codex’s origin and text. But maybe it’s best I didn’t. Best that I never fully knew what meaning we’d unearthed. That some secrets remain buried in the mud. To be discovered again. One thousand years from now.