THE BOOK OF NEVER:
I.    Passions of other people... (0:00)
II.   The world's a town (7:15)
III.  Burns I'd like to forget... (8:01)
IV.  The world's a town (14:03)
V.   Tears I've never wept... (15:41)
VI.  The world's a town (20:14)
VII. Name's of things I once believed... (22:30)

PERFORMED BY:
The Crossing

ABOUT:
The Book of Never lasts half an hour. But it took one thousand years to make.

It began with the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 AD owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the Ukrainian village of Novgorod converting the town from Paganism to Christianity. But when word of Isaakiy’s use of Pagan ritual reached the church elite, he and the village were excommunicated for heresy. Through destruction of icons, texts, and writing tools, this meant a complete erasure of written records from Novgorod, its language, and its religion.

And so, Isaakiy set out to save the collective memory of Novgorod. Over his wooden pages he poured layers of wax, marking each with text — his dualistic prayers, the first written instances of the Rus’ alphabet, scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. Isaakiy’s paper rubbings are lost to time, but scratches on the wood and wax remain.

There they stayed until the year 2000 (exactly one millennium later) when archaeologists unearthed them perfectly preserved in mud underneath Novgorod, with thousands of tiny glyphs scratched into a mass of hardened and broken wax. The codex was taken to the world’s foremost Slavonic linguist, Andrei Zaliznyak, who meticulously parsed through the overlapped writing to find letters, then words, then phrases. The resulting text is somewhere between liturgy, the chanting of a vindictive spell, a recitation of sins, and a grammar lesson.

The Book of Never freely combines English translations from the Novgorod Codex with fragments by twentieth century writers in various states of exile:

• Oscar Wilde’s bitter letter to his lover Alfred Douglas written while imprisoned for his homosexuality

• The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street recorded by the band in France while avoiding tax debt

• Socialist and Chilean expat Pablo Neruda’s epic history of the Americas in Cantos General

• An interview with philosopher and black rights activist Angela Davis after her release from the Marin County Women’s Detention Facility

• The poetry of musician and holocaust survivor Andre Singer after fleeing to the United States

• Thanhhà Lại’s autobiographical verse novel Inside Out and Back Again about the young daughter of a Vietnamese refugee family growing up in Alabama

• Gertrude Stein’s Descriptions of Literature built from cryptic one-sentence descriptions of books in the library she shared with her romantic partner Alice B. Toklas

The melodies and chords in The Book of Never were constructed prior to laying in the text and made solely of densely collaged hymns (only a few notes each) from the Stichera Alphabetica, sung in association with the psalms of the Novgorod Codex’s wooden tablets. The first letters of these hymns spell out the alphabet, echoing sequences found in the codex. These are layered on top of one another, juxtaposed, and harmonized with dense clusters built by simulating extremely long reverberations in digitally engineered virtual spaces.

The long story of The Book of Never has an uncanny epitaph. I began writing this music on December 17, 2017 during a particularly snowy and silent day in Chicago. A week later, halfway around the world in Ukraine, Andrei Zaliznyak died before he could complete his work transcribing the Novgorod Codex. It was a haunting synchronicity, one that I would only learn two years later. I’d hoped to contact Zaliznyak. To commune with him on the codex’s origin, its text, and its revelations. But maybe it’s best I didn’t. Best that I never fully knew what meaning I’d unearthed. That some secrets remain buried in the mud. To be discovered again. One thousand years from now.

The Book Of Never

PERFORMED BY:

The Crossing

ABOUT:

The Book of Never lasts two thirds of an hour. But it took one thousand years to make.

It begins with the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the Ukrainian village of Novgorod, sent to convert the town from Paganism to Orthodox Christianity. But when word of Isaakiy’s use of Pagan ritual reached the church elite, he and the entire village were excommunicated for heresy. Through destruction of sacred icons, texts, and writing tools, this meant a complete erasure of any written records of Novgorod, its language, and its religion.

And so, Isaakiy set out to save the collective memory of Novgorod. Over the psalms carved into his wooden pages he poured dozens of wax layers, marking each with text, making birch rubbings of the words he was attempting to preserve — his dualistic prayers, the first written instances of the Rus’ alphabet, sarcastic and scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. Isaakiy’s paper rubbings are lost to the decay of time, but scratches on the wood and wax remain.

There they stayed until the year 2000 (exactly one millennium later) when archaeologists unearthed them perfectly preserved in the mud underneath Novgorod, with thousands of tiny glyphs scratched into a mass of hardened and broken wax. The codex was quickly taken to the world’s foremost Slavonic linguist, Andrei Zaliznyak, who meticulously parsed through the overlapped writing to find letters, then words, then phrases. The resulting text is somewhere between liturgy, the chanting of a vindictive spell, a recitation of sins, and a grammar lesson.

The Book of Never freely combines English translations from the Novgorod Codex with fragments by twentieth century writers in various states of exile:

• Oscar Wilde’s bitter letter to his lover Alfred Douglas written while imprisoned for his homosexuality

• The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street recorded by the band in France while avoiding tax debt

• Socialist and Chilean expat Pablo Neruda’s epic history of the Americas in Cantos General

• An interview with philosopher and black rights activist Angela Davis after her release from the Marin County Women’s Detention Facility

• The poetry of musician and holocaust survivor Andre Singer after fleeing to the United States

• Thanhhà Lại’s autobiographical verse novel Inside Out and Back Again about the young daughter of a Vietnamese refugee family growing up in Alabama

• Gertrude Stein’s prose poem Descriptions of Literature built from cryptic one-sentence descriptions of books in the library she shared with her romantic partner Alice B. Toklas

The melodies and chords in The Book of Never were constructed prior to laying in the text and made solely of densely collaged hymns (only a few notes each) from the Stichera Alphabetica, sung in association with the psalms of the Novgorod Codex’s wooden tablets. The first letters of these hymns spell out the alphabet, echoing sequences found in the codex. These are layered on top of one another, juxtaposed, and harmonized with dense clusters built by simulating extremely long reverberations in digitally engineered virtual spaces.

The long story of The Book of Never has an uncanny epitaph. I began writing this music on December 24, 2017 during a particularly snowy and silent day in Chicago. That same day, halfway around the world in Ukraine, Andrei Zaliznyak died before he could complete his work transcribing the Novgorod Codex. It was a haunting synchronicity, one that I would only learn of two years later. I had hoped to contact Zaliznyak. To commune with him on the codex’s origin, it’s text, and its historical revelations. But maybe it’s best I didn’t. Best that I never fully knew what meaning I’d unearthed. That some secrets remain buried in the mud. To be discovered again. One thousand years from now.

VII - Names Of Things I Once Believed

VI - The World's A Town

V - Tears I've Never Wept

IV - The World's A Town

III - Burns I'd Like To Forget

II - The World's A Town

I - Passions Of Other People

PERFORMED BY
Sage DeAgro-Ruopp, soprano
Daniel Michalak, piano

ABOUT
A long while is freely assembled from the 583 words spoken by Hermione in William Shakespeare's final stage work, The Winter's Tale. The words and music were written in tandem — drawing from a reservoir of vocal, verbal, and melodic fragments whose cadence and harmony are all closely intertwined — allowing for a spontaneous approach to text setting that still retains traces of the original verse. The result is a kind of Schwanengesang for a centuries-old woman that never lived.  An unusual character in an unusual play, Hermione is sentenced to death by her husband for an adultery she didn’t commit, only to come back to life after sixteen years. Much has been made of her revival (was it by magic or some other more rational means) but what about her experience over those long years? What happens to her thoughts? Her feelings? How do they transform over time? What if her solitude lasted into the present? Would her memories linger? Or would she be left in a continuously fading present? An eternal now? What is this long expanse of waiting?

A Long While

Performed by:
Sarah Tiedemann, flutes

About:
An island we never leave is assembled using simple rudiments from folk flute playing traditions, transcribed and fragmented from various historical performances and recorded oral histories in Ireland, Japan, Norway, and Slovakia.

A few facts...

There are at least 37 places in the world named Bird Island.

The only human inhabitants of Japan’s Bird Island (Tori-shima) were shipwrecked castaways, luring and stealing goods from newcomers who then became castaways themselves. Whatever population remained generations later were all killed in 1902 after a volcanic eruption. The island was never resettled.

A familiar sound in Japanese shakuhachi flute playing is koro koro (“rolling”), a trill performed by rapidly alternating several fingers at once, similar to the Irish trad flute cran where a low note is ornamented by trilling three fingers in rapid succession.

Bird Island of Ireland lies in the middle of Strangford Lough near Kircubbin, the town where Rev. William Warwick was hanged in 1798 for writing documents in support of the Irish Rebellion. It will soon disappear as a result of rising sea levels due to climate change.

Slovakia has a manmade Bird Island. It was built in order to re-home bird populations displaced from flooding caused by dams constructed on the Danube that produce renewable electricity and divert floodwaters away from human settlements.

The Slovakian fujara, like the Scandanvian seljefløyte, is a "fipple" flute without finger holes. Only harmonic overtones are playable using the embouchre, and by covering the end of the instrument with the thumb.

The United States has its own Bird Island located at Harris State Beach in Brookings, a coastal Oregon town that was the first mainland US site to be bombed during World War II. In 1962, the pilot of the plane responsible for the bombing returned to Brookings to present the town with his family’s 400-year old samurai sword. Fifty years later in 2011, Brookings was hit by a tsunami caused by the Sendai Earthquake...the most powerful and destructive seismic event in Japanese history.

An Island We Never Leave

0:00-1:04    IV. No sap chantar qui so non di(pp. 74–79, mm. 44–78)
1:04-2:17     V. A penas sai commensar (pp. 86–88, mm. 1–24)
2:17–4:06    I. Farai un vers de dreyt nïen (pp. 10-15, mm. 64-122)

PERFORMED BY
Susan Narucki, soprano
Talea Ensemble

ABOUT
Farai un vers de dreyt nïen:
non er de mi ni d’autra gen,
non er d’amor ni de joven,
ni de ren au;
Qu’enans fo trobatz en durmen
sobre chevau
— Guillame IX (1071-1126 A.D.)

I’ll make a poem of sheer nothingness:
not of me nor of any other,
not of love nor of youth,
nor of anything else;
Because it was composed while dreaming
on a horse.
— Translated by Aaron Helgeson

Commissioned by Grammy-winning soprano Susan Narucki, "Poems of sheer nothingness" is a song cycle on ancient troubadour texts that speak of songwriting itself. All were originally sung. All were subsequently silenced by centuries of dust, their music lost and their native tongue of Occitan (an early ancestor of modern French) nearly forgotten. Some are explanations of the poet’s craft. Some are apologies. Some are pained second thoughts. Some are warnings for those who would try and follow suit.

Written in 2012-2013, my setting proceeds from a simple question: How would I set these texts if I had written them today? This involved consulting the University of Toulouse about pronunciation and meaning of the troubadour texts, speaking with French composer Philippe Manoury whose mother is a native speaker of Occitan, and consulting with early music specialist Jordi Savall on his own historically informed recreations of troubadour songs. The sounds, rhythms, and phrasing of the language were then combined with my own musical vocabulary by recording sung improvisations and instrumental sounds, and transcribing them in the five settings.

The five songs found here are not “settings” in the traditional sense. Nor are they recreations. They are encounters between two imaginations, separated by nearly a millenium. They are beguiling, but also revealing (e far l’ai tal que sen sela — “I’ll make it such of sense concealed,” but also “I’ll make her song such that its sense is hers“). Above all, they ask a simple question: If music could speak to language, what would it say? When words encounter other sounds, what secrets do they keep from each other? How can they talk at all when one seems concrete and the other abstract? When one seems so close to meaning as to be indistinguishable, and the other seems so far from it that it constantly threatens to disappear into the fog of ineffability? Over such a great distance, what kind of poetry would music write to the words it sets? Would it ask forgiveness? As a preliminary repentance? An apology for singing? Perhaps. For we who make song must remember that we sing to the ears of others. That the price of being listened to is being heard. That we must be careful when we whisper nothings, for they are not always so sweet as we'd wish them to be.

Poems of sheer nothingness (selections)

Composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982, Eugene OR) uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to find new ways of engaging with old musical traditions.

Described by Cleveland Classical as "eerily beautiful" and the New York Times as "virtuoso display and engaging instrumental drama," Helgeson's music has received numerous awards and grants from institutions like the Aaron Copland Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum.

In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an "anti-cantata" based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise.

His upcoming choral cycle The Book of Never, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing, collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Russian psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.

Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson's own previous music.

With performances at venues including the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, IRCAM’s Manifeste in Paris, the World New Music Days in Vienna, and the MATA Festival in New York, his music has been championed by such ensembles as the Arditti String Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Reconsil, Uusinta, Argento Ensemble, loadBang, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Wild Shore, SONAR New Music, Les Cris de Paris, and the Formalist Quartet. Recordings of his music are available on Carrier Records, Oberlin Music, and Innova Recordings.

Also a dedicated teacher, Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University's Cali School of Music. Previously Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, he also taught as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with other visiting appointments at the Hartt School of Performing Arts, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of California Washington Center. In addition, he has given lectures and masterclasses at institutions like Northwestern University, Mannes School of Music, Stanford University, and the Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt. A former Fletcher Jones Dissertation Fellow, he holds degrees in music and theater from the University of California San Diego (PhD, MA) and Oberlin College (BMus, BA).

He currently resides in New York.

Poems of sheer nothingness (selections)

Aaron Helgeson

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