Rising – Bryars, The Road
Gavin Bryars – “The Road” from A Native Hill
Sunrise, Wednesday March 18
The road to Gavin Bryars' A Native Hill was a long, complex one. It started with Gavin offering a new work as a gift to us, then searching for a text that would spark the imagination of the singers and the interests of those who listen.
Wendell Berry.
Perfect. The Wendell Berry of 1968 in A Native Hill has all the environmentalism and poetry of the latter activist, but only the roots of his more recent ruthless assessment of our interaction with the earth, its living things, and our curatorial responsibilities. We were all-in. And, for a full concert-length piece.
But then life happened, as it is happening to us all right now. (And, thus, my sitting alone, writing.) In the Fall of 2018, Gavin faced some medical issues that slowed down his usually intrepid, indefatigable self, and he could only complete five the twelve movements planned by the planned premiere. We sang those in December 2018. But, when Gavin returned to writing in Spring 2019, yet more life happened; his daughter's partner, father to her unborn child, suddenly passed away. The rest of A Native Hill is informed by a different kind of pathos than the first part, which was informed by Gavin's own waning strength and growing awareness of his mortality.
This is “The Road", the final movement in that earlier, unfinished version of A Native Hill. We love singing it because we can feel that it was written for us. We can feel it in the counterpoint; by how the harmonic motion 'lands'; by how it depends on teamwork over the long, soaring lines; and by the hovering moments in which Gavin allows a chord to linger, to shine, or to brazenly magnify a dissonance. And, we can feel in it the love with which it was written, but that goes way beyond The Crossing – that's just how Gavin writes.
Be well. Please.
– The Whole Team @ The Crossing
A Native Hill
mvt. 5 "The Road"
music by Gavin Bryars
text by Wendell Berry
recorded in concert October 13, 2019
at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
* * *
Like the pasture gates, the streams are great collectors of comings and goings. The streams go down, and paths always go down besides streams. For a while I walk along an old wagon road that is buried in leaves – a fragment, beginningless and endless as the middle of a sentence on some scrap of papyrus. There is a cedar whose branches reach over this road, and under the branches I find the leavings of two kills of some bird of prey. The most recent is a pile of blue jay feathers. The other has been rained on and is not identifiable. How little we know. How little of this was intended or expected by any man. The road that has become the grave of men's passages has led to the woods.
And I say to myself: Here is your road
without beginning or end, appearing
out of the earth and ending in it, bearing
no load but the hawk's kill, and the leaves
building earth on it, something more
to be borne. Tracks fill with earth
and return to absence. The road was worn
by men bearing earth along it. They have come
to endlessness. In their passing
they could not stay in, trees have risen
and stand still. It is leading to the dark,
to mornings where you are not. Here
is your road, beginningless and endless as God.
–Wendell Berry, from A Native Hill (1968)