The Book of Never
music by aAron Helgeson performed by The Crossing
the Music
The Book of Never, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment, is a thirty-minute choral exhortation based on the ancient Novgorod Codex — a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. believed to be owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the (now Ukrainian) village of Novgorod excommunicated for combining Pagan worship with Russian Orthodox Christianity. To save his culture he poured layer upon layer of wax over the book on which to write his prayers, his alphabet, scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. The Book of Never combines fragments of these texts with words and phrases by twentieth century writers in various states of exile including Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, and Thanhha Lai. These are paired with ancient hymn melodies associated with the codex, reverberated infinitely inside digitally engineered virtual spaces and then transcribed for choir to create music that is both timeful and timeless in its urgent cries across ages and across continents…far from home.
the Artists
Musical America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year, The Crossing is a Grammy-winning chamber choir dedicated to new music and conducted by Donald Nally. They are committed to creating and recording substantial works that expand ways of writing, singing, and listening to music for choir. The ensemble was the American Composers Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music, and their commission Sound from The Bench by Ted Hearne was named a 2018 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. They were the recipient of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence and have received three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award with composer Joel Puckett) from Chorus America. Having presented nearly 180 commissioned world premieres, the choir's recent projects include Julia Wolfe’s historical oratorio Fire in My Mouth with the New York Philharmonic, Tyondai Braxton’s manga-based choral symphony Telekinesis, and Robert Maggio’s theatrical work Aniara with The Netherlands’ Klockriketeatern.
Composer Aaron Helgeson uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix new avant-garde sounds with historical source material. His music has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Aaron Copland Fund, Barlow Endowment, and American Composers Forum. Recent projects include the orchestral aria Sing Your Troubles Quiet commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation that fragments the folk song recordings of a Depression-era prisoner in Santa Fe, and his 2015 Ohio Arts Council Award winning Snow Requiem mixing shards of Norwegian folk song with sonified weather data from the 1888 Children’s Blizzard. Also a scholar of creativity and mental health in the arts, Helgeson currently serves as Artist Fellow at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (BPSI), and as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University.
