Volume 1: Music Meets Radicalism at The Crossing

''My shadow is trapped but not my essence. Repeat. My shadow is trapped but not my essence.''
Wole Soyinka, on making a secret record of his thoughts in prison, in The Man Died.

This is the first of a number of brief reflections on the work and process of presenting the world premiere of Lansing McLoskey's Zealot Canticles. (Sunday, March 19 in Philadelphia).

In April 2011 I had the idea of a piece based on the writings of Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate (Literature, 1986) whose eloquent writings on his experiences as a political prisoner and, more recently, staring into the face of Boko Haram in his home Nigeria, I found truly moving. At the time, I was increasingly concerned with the various pockets of radicalism in our own country - Rep. Gabby Giffords and 13 others had been shot (six died) that January at a Safeway store in Tucson - and I wanted to see what a piece of music might be like that asked questions about the effects of zealotry on the individual and the community. The new work was to be ten minutes long, for the 24-voice Vocal Arts Ensemble of Cincinnati (which I conducted at the time) and Ixi Chen, the brilliant, creative clarinetist in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

The previous summer, The Crossing premiered a commissioned work, The Memory of Rain, by Lansing McLoskey for The Levine Project. (Longtime friends of The Crossing will remember the remarkable final moments in that work, setting Levine's words that refer to the clouds of the poem's title: ''They should be punished every morning / they should be bitten and boiled like spoons.'') The work left a great impression on us; Lansing's music seems to play with, maybe even defy, time - sometimes it feels like it exists in two simultaneous yet different realms of time, at others it seems to slow time as if in a dream. His music can also give the uncanny impression that it is somehow both being art and considering art at the same time - self-reflectiveness achieved simply through counterpoint, color, and time. I felt this was the right voice for Soyinka (if, in fact, any voice is right for this) - to ask questions about oppression, imprisonment, politics, lies, suppression, and pain.

Lansing's work, premiered in early 2011, was so strong that I was convinced it was just the beginning of a substantial, important work on the topic - ten minutes of a future sixty minute, concert-length work. Of course, I wanted this larger work for The Crossing. We waited for quite a while until the time felt right, adding soloists and string quartet to the forces. Yet, eighteen months ago when we targeted this March as the premiere, neither Lansing nor I could have guessed that topic would have come home to our own country. We now stare into the face of our own fears, like Soyinka in the 1960s.

Lansing's new work is, as I knew it would be, art first. He has captured fear and anger and exhaustion and defiance in a virtuosic score that will require much of the artists who begin to rehearse it this Saturday, February 18. (We have indeed noticed the irony of it being four days before the birthday of George Washington, whose signature appears first on our Constitution.)

Our Zealot Chronicles will each include a bit of text from Lansing's libretto. But, for this first entry, I offer Lansing's beautiful program note - a little of the history, in his own words, of the creation of Zealot Canticles.

''You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.''

- Ariel Dorfman, in The World that Harold Pinter Unlocked