The Street
The Street is a set of meditations on the fourteen 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: “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: asmall 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 cradle-song, fast forwards an hour, and ends with a vision of the night sky. Nico Muhly
The religious imagination makes what it needs out of what it’s given. You may not have been among the crowds that filled Jerusalem during that first Holy Week; you may have been born in a different age. Never mind. You can make the pilgrimage, walk through the streets, pray, and you are there. You may not be able to manage the pilgrimage. Never mind. Go down to church. Around the walls there are fourteen images of the Stations of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa recreated for local use. Walk around them, pausing to pray. Imagine you are there, in that time and in that place. Here
is this tiny schematic scene; a picture or a carving. What is in it for you? What do your senses tell you? You are to be attuned to every vibration of guilt and sorrow, love, and boredom. The membrane between the religious imagination and the erotic imagination is semi-permeable, incredibly thin. This is what St Robert Southwell SJ (1561–95, martyr and poet) acknowledged when he wrote, ‘Passions I allow and loves I approve, onely I would wishe that men would alter their object and better their intent.’
The Street is a set of meditations on the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross. That’s what attracted me to the project. Traditionally, each Station is given a meditation and a prayer. You look at the image, you hear or read the meditation, you say the prayer: you take it in and move on. Writing these texts was the kind of technical challenge that as a librettist I’ve always found liberating. Alice Goodman
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For booking inquiries, please contact:
Noé Kains, different birds
https://www.differentbirds.org/
