To The Hands
To the Hands
Premiered in 2016 by The Crossing and International Contemporary Ensemble, in Philadelphia
How does one respond to an image of another person’s pain? And how does one respond to the music of another artist who is trying to ask that same question? These are the two queries that anchored my approach to The Crossing’s incredible Seven Responses project. To the Hands begins and ends with strains of Buxtehude’s own Ad manus, with small harmonic and melodic references woven occasionally throughout. The divisions of the piece into six parts reflects the partitioning of Membra Jesu Nostri, and I continued the tradition of blending old text with new.
The first movement acts as a prelude and turns the opening tune of Ad manus into a wordless plainchant melody. The second movement fragments Buxtehude’s setting of the central question, “quid sunt plagae istae in medio manuum tuarum,” or “what are these wounds in the midst of your hands.” It settles finally on an inversion of the question, so that we reflect, “What are these wounds in the midst of our hands?” We notice what may have been done to us, but we also question what we have done and what our role has been in these wounds we see before us.
The text that follows in the third movement is a riff on Emma Lazarus’ sonnet The New Colossus, famous for its engraving at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem’s lines “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and its reference to the statue’s “beacon-hand” present a very different image of a hand — one that is open, beckoning, and strong. No wounds are to be found there — only comfort for those caught in a dangerous and complex environment. While third movement operates in broad strokes from a distance, the fourth zooms in on the map so far that we see the intimate scene of an old woman in her home, maybe setting the table for dinner alone. Who is she, where has she been, whose lives has she left? This simple image melts into a meditation on the words in caverna from the Song of Solomon, found in Buxtehude’s fourth section, Ad latus.
In the fifth movement the harmony is passed around from one string instrument to another, overlapping only briefly, while numerical figures are spoken by the choir. These are global figures of internally displaced persons, by country, sourced from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) data reported in May 2015 (accessed on 20/03/2016 at www.internal-displacement.org). Sometimes data is the cruelest and most honest poetry.
The sixth and final movement unfolds the words in caverna into the tumbling and comforting promise of “ever ever” — “ever ever will I hold you, ever ever will I enfold you”. They could be the words of Christ, or of a parent or friend or lover, or even of a nation.