For choir and obbligato improviser; 
text from Lamentations 1:12 and "The Cry" by Denise Levertov, with permissions from New Directions Publishing

Commissioned & premiered by Khorikos with Charlotte Greve (alto saxophone), November 12, 2023, Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua, NYC.

The first line of Lamentations 1:12 is a question in the original Hebrew: “Is it nothing to you?” This is missed in the vulgate Latin translation into the widely spread "O vos omnes", but the question is more pertinent. Not only a call for help or pity, but implicitly a warning. Matthew Henry’s 1710 commentary puts it concisely: "Jerusalem sitting dejected on the ground calls on those that passed by to consider whether her example did not concern them. Her outward sufferings were great but her inward sufferings were harder to bear through the sense of guilt. Sorrow for sin must be great sorrow and must affect the soul.” Our sorrows now are certainly “great”, especially oriented towards a future whose imagination is inextricable from the specter of a more total destruction than ever before. Hence Denise Levertov’s poem, “The Cry,” which gives voice to that inward suffering through the very impossibility: “Nothing for eloquence / no rhetoric / fits / that unrendering” — paradoxically, it only made sense to try and work through this nothing, to sing in its face with the old and new words, to know your NOW only through what it could be, and choose accordingly with the ineffable escape route of sounds: the bird, the child, the choir, the saxophone. These real and poetic things, and the very efficacy of how they articulate themselves, are constantly shifting around uneasily over the course of this piece.

Is It Nothing

Composition, improvisation, instrumentalization, realizations.

Is It Nothing

Zvibes