“Wander and wonder out under the sky"

“Wander and wonder out under the sky”

by Donald Nally

During one of my nearly countless career chapters, I was teaching for a semester at the University of Illinois and feeling rather isolated. The School was very different from the vibrant culture when I did my doctoral studies there; complicated and messy, and with the choral world in the bowels of a late-1960’s polished- concrete jungle, I quickly became so frustrated and perplexed that I considered packing up and admitting a mistake. 

I stayed for two reasons. 

The first: students give us a sense of purpose, of responsibility, of inspiration. We will not let them down. Their trust in their teachers requires those teachers to focus on the next generations with the hope they’ll make the world a better place. 

The second, was that my husband, back in Philadelphia, sent me a song he wanted me to hear. He figured it would calm me down. And it did. 

I don’t often listen to pop music, and I haven’t since I was 17. It’s not purposeful, it just doesn’t occupy space in a packed day. Steven assured me this was Indie, or somewhere in the easement between pop and Classical, or maybe even in that area of music in which I now fine myself living – absent of style bias, defying conventional genre divisions.  

That song is “I have never loved someone,” written and sung by Shara Nova. 

On the surface, it is simple and sparse; yet, the melody isn’t one that just anybody can sing. In fact, the song opens with what feels like a long verse leading to a refrain. Not unusual, but the transition to the refrain, which is higher in range, is mesmerizing; it reminds me of the song formulas of Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter. Until it doesn’t: at the end of the refrain, the melody reaches an even greater height and becomes Puccini-esque in the way it carries the listener gradually and magnificently to an apotheosis. And yet the whole thing is unoperatic; it’s just a song, a really honest song, sung by a very beautiful voice with just the right balance of courage and vulnerability. 

On that crazy, dark January weekend in Urbana, I went down a Shara Nova rabbit hole.  And, I continued down that hole for a few years, exploring her band My Brightest Diamond, following her name change (from Worden to Nova), discovering a seemingly endless outpouring of new creative work, a video collaboration with my friend David Lang (pain changes), and an amazing role in Suzanne Bocanegra’s show Poorly Watched Girls at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, in which she, dressed in a costume designed by Suzanne and featuring a wheat sheaf hat, plays the autoharp. 

Autoharps played a significant role in my childhood. Autoharps get my attention. I attended an uber-liberal church in Bedminster, Pennsylvania. I was 7 in 1968. There were a lot of Autoharps. 

A few years later, we played the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, where My Brightest Diamond was also playing. We got to see Shara live, meet her, and make the incredible discovery that her bass player (one of a three-member band) was a student of mine 20 years earlier when I taught at a performing arts high school in Chicago. The show affirmed my previous assessment that this is a deliriously gifted artist with no stylistic limitations, no musical boundaries, no cap on imagination. 

Providence speaks loudly at times. 

I quietly put Shara on my “must work” with list, waiting for the right moment, figuring she would most likely be too busy. The moment came with one of our pandemic response projects, Carol’s after a Plague. I asked David Lang to make the connection. He obliged, and Shara responded immediately, and I soon learned that while I was going down the Shara Nova rabbit hole, she was going down The Crossing rabbit hole, having first fallen in love with our recording of John Luther Adams Canticles of the Holy Wind (one of our heavier recording lifts!). 

Shara‘s brain. Oof. it works fast; her mind goes deeply into any topic; connections happen in the moment. Not long after my request to write one 3-4-minute piece, she sent me eight different text/music sketches to discuss. That’s like investing in Microsoft in the 1980s. All of them were terrific, but we couldn’t use eight! Though we were looking for only one, I truly loved the way three of them fit together to make a set, with their veiled references to Christmas carols, yet secular sentiments inviting us to respond to the social unrest of the time by rejoicing in our discomfort. The set solved a structural problem for the project – how to organize twelve brief works from as many composers - by providing a stylistically cohesive beginning, middle, and end to the performances and album. So, she wrote the text and music for three Carols.  

Do not abandon high ideals.
Do not run to distraction.
Do not run from your discomfort.
Be curious.
Return to your commitments.
Increase your discomfort to find your joy,
and live humbly under the sun.

When Shara came to visit us for the recording and performance the singers took to her in such an extraordinarily warm way that I knew these Carols were just the beginning of what was going to be a very fruitful relationship. Soon after, we began talking about writing a much longer piece. 

Enter the visionary John Zirkle at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana, where we had a Summer residency for nearly a decade. John and I schemed to bring Shara to Big Sky to rehearse and premiere this new, big work, which Shara called Titration. Not surprisingly, it was another hit with singers, and also with audiences, bouncing from style to style in a kaleidoscope of textures, and focusing on a similar theme to the Carols – how do we address the historical racism and anxiety that we carry in our bodies; how do we connect with our vagal system and live with ourselves and each other; how do we forgive and find love? We wound up choosing some movement of it for our Tiny Desk concert, with Shara providing context. 

Imagine a favorite resting place
A candle flame on your nightstand
The coffee smell on the morning air
The afternoon light on your hugging chair

Imagine an ocean side or a cloud ride...

So, when I went to Suzanne Bocanegra to talk about a project that would involve multiple composers, it was clear that we would be going back to Shara to bring all of this history together: Shara, Big Ears, Big Sky, JLA, David Lang and his spouse Suzanne, albums, tours, and, of course, the glue of it all: my partner Steven. I couldn’t wait to see what Shara would create, but I couldn’t have imagined – or perhaps I should have imagined – that she would dig deep into our history and reference it, as if we’d spoken about this very thing. 

On of my favorite things to do in my role as The Crossing’s conductor, is sit down at my piano and read through a piece of music for the first time, being the first eyes to view this new creation after the composer’s. It’s a privilege, and honor, and a responsibility. It feels incredibly intimate; my studio is never calmer and quieter than in those moments. Sometimes, in that process, there is a moment that jars me and brings everything to a pause, while I try to fully comprehend what this composer has written for our singers – what gift of emotion, authenticity, clarity they have conceived with us in mind. I think of moments in David Shapiro’s Sumptuous Planet Mass, of the last movement of Gavin Bryars’ A Native Hill, of “Protest” in Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth, and Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Translation (in memory of Jeff), and Edie Hill’s Spectral Spirits, and numerous raw places in David Lang’s poor hymnal, and the third movement of Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, and Paul Fowler’s Breath, Ayanna Woods’ “Golden Hour,” and Kile Smith’s Jerusalem, and, and, and, and. So, I should not have been surprised to find a moment like this here, when reading for the first time, Shara’s setting of Suzanne’s text, “Tornado.”  

Tornado begins with a reference to a moment in Titration, calling for calm, as the text suggest, amidst a sound world of anxiety and sirens. It stays in the “action pocket” in a musical world of wind, chaos, and alarm until the text turns to the “after”: “When the tornado stops, remain where you are until you are sure it is safe.” Shara wrote a musical bridge from the tornado to the “after tornado.” And it brings all this history together: it is a direct quote from John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind, the work through which she came to know The Crossing. She chose the opening, “Sky with Four Suns,” but beautifully lets it dissolve into the sound of breath – our breath, perhaps, to Shara, the holy wind. Certainly, the thing that keeps us alive, that animates us, that affirms our being. It feels like from Shara to the singers, and it has been embraced by them in the most extraordinary way – the color they make in the following passage can, for me, only be described in one way: grateful.

How is it to slow down time
and wander and wonder out under the sky.