Decline & Fall  3rd mvt

Since 500 B.C. history records approximately 1196 rebellions, revolutions, revolts, uprisings and protests across the known world. Only a tiny fraction of these contestations of power have resulted in victories for the rebels. Nonetheless, as people struggle under the burden of systemic violence, the unrest remains seething if albeit petrified in our global midst. And though very few will admit it, calling these rebellions, revolutions, revolts, uprisings and protests the REAL history of our world is not unjustified.

“You will be smashed like a piece of pottery— shattered so completely that there won’t be a piece big enough to carry coals from a fireplace or a little water from the well.”  Isaiah 30:14

Clinging to the broken shards, klipot, are sparks of the light left over from inside the bowls. These precious sparks are to be gathered and restored to their original place, higher in the cosmos. 

A broken world, which today we experience as petrified unrest must be repaired, or, as we now see, we will suffer the consequences.

PETRIFIED UNREST

SHREDDED is an attempt to express in music what it feels like to be alive in this particular historical moment. Built on fragments, interruptions and collisions, SHREDDED sets the four players in conflict and collusion as they search for a way out ..

”There is no horizon here. There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamor of the disparate, fragmentary present…Nothing flows through, everything interrupts.” John Berger on the third panel of Bosch’s Millennium Triptych.


SHREDDED

MORNING EVENING LOVE BEARS ALL  mvts 3 & 4

THE SONG OF PROPHET X sets an eponymous poem as a scored recitation and song accompanied by piano quartet. The poem was written when I returned from India where I had been traveling with my wife , Melba Levick, as she photographed for two books about that indescribably and flagrantly vibrant country. The “people” referred to in the text are at one and the same time the visibly oppressed and dispossessed of the world,  us, the anxiety-ridden ‘first worlders’ who have been “ground down and shredded’ perhaps by the insistent lunacy of our very privileges, and the Prophet himself who in the end recognizes that much of his description of the plight of ‘his people’ is the plight he himself is undergoing.  The “paleophonic” parameters I try to bring to the instrumental component of the piece refer to a hidden disruption that I personally—and perhaps I am not alone—have been feeling for several decades.

THE SONG OF PROPHET X

07 CONSTELLATION mvt 3

Constellation is a five-movement work for string quartet and bass-baritone. Each of the first four movements defines a different «point» in the constellation within which we find ourselves as a culture and as a civilization, and the work culminates in the perspective of a liberating wisdom.
The first movement is based on a stanza from William Blake’s Book of Urizen. The Scientific Revolution construed truth as verified mathematical proof. For Blake, truth was the Divine Sprit which illuminated mankind and the world from within.
The second movement, ”Our Triumph”, fast-forwards 250 years to impending environmental collapse and culminates with a question: ‘Is there no way to silence the roar of our triumph?’
In movement three, ‘”Long Black Strands”, Nicholas Isherwood plays the role of an army veteran paralyzed by what he has seen and done.
“Endorse and Like Me, Please”, the fourth movement, is the voice of a man whose essential life takes place online.
The final movement, “Light”, is based on the esoteric and mystical writings of the 2nd-century Gnostic, Saint Thomas, who teaches the possibility of another way of being human.

Hugh Levick

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