Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Mark Adamo
No. 10: Supreme Virtue (2000)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
Programme Note
Text:
"Tao te Ching," trans. Stephen Mitchell
Composer Note:
For a few years I was the tenor section leader of a choir in Washington, and in singing with and composing for them I'd become more and more interested in the quasi-instrumental vocal gesture. Stephen Mitchell's pellucid translation of this verse of the "Tao te Ching" — a series of moral challenges all beginning with the words "Can you?" — spurred me to explore this idea at length. The singers, divided into two SATB choirs, intone the first question in a dusky C-minor against a sighing backdrop of wind sounds: then, as the first choir utters the text's first challenge, the second choir refracts their words into marimba-like repeated notes, as if the long lines of the first choir were subjected to a kind of aural strobe.
As the questions become tougher, so do the sounds: tenors and altos stab into the texture with horn-like interruptions, and the phrase "Can you?" disrupts the unwavering four-four pulse with insistent threes and twos. At a peak of intensity, a looping soprano-alto line spirits us away from pulse and chord, leading first to a melodic meditation based on the vowels of "Can you?" and then to a cadenza, in which chords appear and vanish into a shimmering, ever-present curtain of sound. A vision of equanimity is intoned in the open fifths of (both Western and Eastern) chant: then, as if elated by its discovery ("This is the supreme virtue") the chorus reworks its "Can you?" motive: a nudging half-step expands to a whole step, the harmony brightens to B-flat, and, in rhythms now more jubilant than insistent, the score spins to closure.
— Mark Adamo
"Tao te Ching," trans. Stephen Mitchell
Composer Note:
For a few years I was the tenor section leader of a choir in Washington, and in singing with and composing for them I'd become more and more interested in the quasi-instrumental vocal gesture. Stephen Mitchell's pellucid translation of this verse of the "Tao te Ching" — a series of moral challenges all beginning with the words "Can you?" — spurred me to explore this idea at length. The singers, divided into two SATB choirs, intone the first question in a dusky C-minor against a sighing backdrop of wind sounds: then, as the first choir utters the text's first challenge, the second choir refracts their words into marimba-like repeated notes, as if the long lines of the first choir were subjected to a kind of aural strobe.
As the questions become tougher, so do the sounds: tenors and altos stab into the texture with horn-like interruptions, and the phrase "Can you?" disrupts the unwavering four-four pulse with insistent threes and twos. At a peak of intensity, a looping soprano-alto line spirits us away from pulse and chord, leading first to a melodic meditation based on the vowels of "Can you?" and then to a cadenza, in which chords appear and vanish into a shimmering, ever-present curtain of sound. A vision of equanimity is intoned in the open fifths of (both Western and Eastern) chant: then, as if elated by its discovery ("This is the supreme virtue") the chorus reworks its "Can you?" motive: a nudging half-step expands to a whole step, the harmony brightens to B-flat, and, in rhythms now more jubilant than insistent, the score spins to closure.
— Mark Adamo