From Ivory Depths

Duration:

9'

Commissioned by Volti for the 2016 Choral Arts Lab.

I. Monday
White and distant,
absorbed in itself,  
endlessly the sky covers and uncovers,
moves and remains.

II. Tuesday
From ivory depths  
words rising shed their blackness,  
blossom and penetrate.  
The sky veils her stars;  then bares them.

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday.” –Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 1919

Virginia Woolf’s ability to highlight the extraordinary and beautiful amidst a “normal” setting is an artistic practice that I aspire to. Her groundbreaking short stories could perhaps be likened to visual collages—the stream-of-consciousness style quickly shifts the reader’s attention from one vivid image to another. In my reading of “Monday or Tuesday,” I was struck by the structural recurrence of a few images: the color white, an expansive sky, and a wave-like movement of opening and closing.

Thus, these two movements are very interconnected and similar in many ways, even sharing texts. I was interested in finding places where the imagery of these two textual fragments collide, dramatizing their overlap as well as deviations from each other. The overall trajectory of the entire piece is that of fragmentation— a chorale, set in near slow-motion, progresses until it dissolves into muttered noises. An alto voice remains alone at the conclusion of each movement, as if narrating the linear, yet lilting motion of time even as the swirling images around her come to a pause.