“The sense of discovery as you put all the pieces together"

“The sense of discovery as you put all the pieces together”

by Jackson Williams, Baritone with The Crossing

When creating a new piece of music as part of an ensemble, you never arrive at the first rehearsal with a complete picture the final result. You learn your part, and you familiarize yourself with the harmonic/rhythmic context around it, but there are almost always aspects of a piece that turn out differently from the way you’d imagined. The sense of discovery as you put all the pieces together is something that I have always loved about singing with the Crossing.

My personal work leading up to How to Survive did not reveal much. The texts did not immediately speak to me; all four were very similar, reading as a list of emotionally detached instructions which I dreaded memorizing. The music presented other barriers to entry. In one, I spend most of my time singing a list of conditions (“If you are inside/outside/driving”). In another I hardly sing, instead passing long stretches either yelling or making mouth noises. One piece was almost all quarter notes. I was curious to see what we would make of it all.

We started the rehearsal process with a lengthy presentation explaining the genesis of the project, the inspiration behind it, the players involved in its creation, and an overview of what we aimed to accomplish over the course of the next month. It was fascinating, but I admit to leaving that meeting more bewildered than I came in.

The fog started to lift once we started rehearsing. The first thing I discovered was that these pieces were fun to sing. They were full of texture, groove, and sound effects. They were also very different from one another. These differences aided greatly in terms of memory, making “If you are outside…” in a hurricane easily distinguishable from the same location in another disaster.

Through the repetition inherent in the memorization process, I also started to notice some interplay between the texts. They all share a common form: “If you are in x situation, do y.” The advice varies according to the setting and the disaster, but there are common threads that appear: stay inside, drop to the ground, get under a table, stay away from various hazards, above all stay calm.

In the end I found this collection of pieces much more compelling than I had first imagined. I especially enjoyed discovering the relationships between them. They all attempt to deliver the same message (how to survive) in the the same format, but address wildly different scenarios in diverse musical worlds.

I don’t know if participating in this project has changed my personal relationship with natural disasters, but I do find myself thinking back to it often when watching news footage of events like these around the world. Considering whether to go out for a walk during one period of wildfire-reduced air quality in particular drove the point home that the more time passes, the more likely it is that the advice I spent all this time to memorize may come in handy one day.