Ambition, pt. 2
O wear your tribulation like a rose
Hi there,
First, some performances coming up that I think you'd enjoy:
This Saturday 4/26 and Sunday 4/27, KHORIKOS sings Aspiration, a program I've been tinkering with for a little over a year. I'm so proud of the energy and focus the group has brought to it. Last weekend we rehearsed the program in full and, wow, it flows. It still challenges me. (Damn, I guess that means we haven't collectively solved desire? Back to the drawing board/lab/forest/altar)
(this is two performances of the same program. I've learned my lesson about this.)
On May 31st, at 3pm, we're doing an hour-ish set at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, as part of their second Community Day. We'll sing a bit of Aspiration, and a bit of Across the Open Spaces, the group's latest album, which...
comes out on May 23rd! You can pre-save the album here, and I must begrudgingly boost Apple Music so you can hear the album in Dolby Atmos — a sense of physical space was central to this project, and me and my dear collaborator Dan Dzula have worked hard to make it feel as close-to-live as possible in this spatial audio-focused format. More about all this in another newsletter soon.
On June 14th at 7:30pm, at the Sound Mind Center, we'll sing Across the Open Spaces in full and then have a calm party about it. Tickets and other details soon.
If you've appreciated what KHORIKOS is up to, I hope you'll consider signing up with us on Patreon for more frequent unpackings about our process, or supporting our ongoing campaign on Givebutter. Believe it or not we still have zero paid staff; every dollar very literally goes directly to more music getting made.
In my last newsletter, I pointed to W. H. Auden’s deliciously searing critique of Benjamin Britten, which is positively shot through Britten’s Hymn To St. Cecilia, which we’re singing this weekend! The piece comes at that golden ratio moment in the concert, at which point we’ll have hammered home the tragically-not-foregone conclusion: unexamined ambition can be poison. We know this well in our time, as the greed of a few small men imperils millions of lives, but in Auden’s case it was meant to prompt Britten to reckon with his very personal sense of responsibility as an artist. This kind of thinking kicks my butt on the regular. What am I here to do?
The goal of this project was not to say ambition bad! over and over, nor to fetishize the hard truth of failure. Up and up and up is so clearly a trap, and down down down is not necessarily the end or even ultimately bad! Rather, everybody experiences some version of both, but in different ways, and (spoilers) it’s imperative that we take account of and share the ways in which our experiences are unique.
It has turned out that KHORIKOS programs over the last few years have routinely involved some investigation of the relationship between an individual experience and a collective one. (“duh, it’s a choir,” he realized years later.) In CIVITAS in 2023, that experience was grief. With Britten’s twisted Ye that pasen by, and our premiere of Ben Zucker’s Is it nothing (feat. Denise Levertov and Charlotte Greve), we dug into the historic O Vos Omnes text, which is more or less “Hey you: look at my pain. Is it anything like yours?”
Similarly, Louise Glück (easily in my top 5 poets) asks:
Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.
Both of these texts are some kind of abstract conversation between the person experiencing grief and everyone else.
In Aspiration, near the end of Cecilia, we have “O wear your tribulation like a rose.” This is a bit more one-on-one. It’s the real thrust of the conversation between Auden and Britten, or maybe… St Cecilia and Britten? God and Britten? Britten and Britten? Auden and Auden?
In any case, there are a lot of ways to read this, and hey if you come to the concert, you can hear how it's set to music and feel it out yourself! For me (at serious risk of projecting) it's Auden trying to get Britten to examine his ambition and desire through a lens: from what tribulation does it stem? What if we talk about that? Why don't you wear that, and, somehow even proudly?
I love the melody that that line bears, so much that I spun it off into another piece that the group is performing this weekend: Cento, a word I borrowed from the poetry practice of stitching together lines from other poems. I compiled snippets from Louise Glück, Theresa K. Miller, and ol' Auden:
this is consistent with what we know of human behavior
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.
we grow toward warmth or the window
O[r] re-arrange.
In this context, Cento means "patchwork." In the Britten, there's this clash between the trumpety E major "O wear your tribulation" and this cold, fraught C major "like a rose" and… I have just straight lifted that tension, among many others, and plenty of my own, into Cento. A patchwork is an idealistic, utopian exercise: by heeding Auden’s call en masse, we’d collectivize our desires, at least in an imagined reality where there are mutually compatible; not a zero-sum, in which the rise of a winner relies on the fall of a loser, but an interweaving instead.
The concert as a whole (and, uhhhh, ...every concert?!) is an outline, or one of an unimaginable number of possible models, of our shared experience with aspiration and drive. We've commissioned music from Hilary Purrington, had two amazing scores by Ed Frazier Davis and Shara Nova fall into our laps, and hand-picked some gems from Du Yun, Sarah Rimkus, Nico Muhly, and more. This show’s got it all: neo-madrigal, post-Soviet sacred music, someone scraping a bouncy ball across the face of a large gong.
Thanks for reading and listening. If you’re new to this newsletter: this is an every-few-months sort of thing, with brief updates on my work and other collected ideas. If you’d rather not receive emails from me, feel free to unsubscribe below.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Alec