Near the end of the first movement of Noche Oscura (Dark Night), the track titled “Anima mea turbata est valde,” six pre-recorded and processed voice parts, what I call “virtual voices,” enter together, all of them singing the title words (Anima mea…). However, a number of obstacles interfere with the intelligibility of the text. Each voice sings independently, with their own melody and at their own speed, producing more cacophony than homophony. The soloist, who previously introduced that same text, is now singing a new text in the foreground while the virtual voices are off in the background. Meanwhile, six more virtual voices are creating a layer of textured noise by shushing and hissing. Lastly, all the singing is in Latin. Even if the text were front and center, not many people have the necessary working knowledge of the language to understand the meaning in real time. The text translates as “My soul is sorely troubled.”
The sorely troubled soul and the path toward inner peace through spiritual purification are the subjects of Noche Oscura, with a central text of the same name by Saint John of the Cross (1542 - 1591), a Spanish monk and mystic. All the voices, live soloist and 12 virtual voices, take on a handful of roles throughout the work and each role is engaged in some aspect of that spiritual journey towards peace and divine union. The lofty purpose of the composition asked for a sense of transcendence in the text, as if it were a divine language without a known meaning.
Of course, Latin and Spanish are natural languages, so the text does have meaning: a great deal of it in fact. My approach elevated the musical aspects of the text, shifting the locus of its meaning outside of the cantata itself. This approach had to assume the listener would lack an immediate understanding of either Latin or Spanish, and they would listen to the cantata at least once before consulting the liner book, with the text and translations into English, on subsequent listens. This way, whatever meaning you construct can expand with every listen without losing the initial sense of unknowing. The liner book is available here or at Bandcamp.
The lofty purpose of the composition asked for a sense of transcendence in the text, as if it were a divine language without a known meaning.
Reading John of the Cross’ poem “Noche Oscura” is just like that. Written in Spanish, it is a short poem, only eight stanzas long, five lines to a stanza. It reads like a love poem, beginning:
In a dark night,
with longings aflame in love,
oh blessed chance!,
I left without being observed
my house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure,
by the secret ladder disguised,
oh blessed chance!,
in darkness and in concealment,
my house being now at rest.
But, this is no love poem of romantic courtship. The meaning of these lines is spiritual and so heavily symbolic that John wrote two books, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, that both contain the poem itself and multiple chapters on the meaning of just those two stanzas. He contextualizes this with detailed explanations of the doctrine that give rise to the poem as well. The Ascent of Mount Carmel is the source of all the additional text in the cantata. John cites biblical quotations, and one from Boethius (c. 480 - 524), throughout the book as foundations for his thinking. He cites these himself in Latin. I selected a handful of these to add to his poem, creating a richer text for the cantata.
Whenever I use text in a composition, most of my choices are justified by something I have observed in that text. In this case, I discovered the same things in the poem that excite me about my own work. The term I always think of is resonance: the vibration of an object is a source that causes vibrations to occur in another object, to oversimplify a physical explanation of resonance. I work in the domain of a metaphorical kind of resonance. Of course I don’t always succeed, but the goal is to create a work with elements that all act on and resonate with each other. There should be fascinating, beautiful things to hear on the surface and a multiplicity of connections to make, as a listener, between those things. Hopefully, those connections will continue to add up, change, and develop the more you listen.
— B.H.