An open letter to Dallas Chamber Choir

The following letter was written after ‘Your name falls like rain’ was completed, but before the senseless murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020. After some internal debate, I decided to keep the letter as it was originally written, as documentation of what the COVID-19 pandemic was like before the United States was thrown into upheaval by yet another unconscionable murder of a black American at the hands of authorities. There will be more opportunities to creatively express the outrage all of us feel at this senseless act of violence, but as this piece was written to address the losses of the pandemic, it did not feel genuine to try to redirect the emotional content of the work to fit the injustice we are fighting now, just weeks later, as I delivered it to Dallas Chamber Choir. I will say that, while this piece was not originally meant to address the rampant racial injustice present in this country today, the power of a name has never been clearer to me before. George Floyd’s name joins others on a list that has become, far, far too long. I hope that in remembering these names and the power they hold, we will remember the terrible human cost of overt and covert racism in America, and that in speaking them aloud, we will call others to action in the fight for justice.

-         Thomas LaVoy
June 4,  2020

Dear friends,

Given the nature of this commission and the set of circumstances that we are saddled with in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed appropriate to me to write a proper letter to you in lieu of the standard introductory notes at the beginning of a commissioned work. However, instead of waxing on broadly about how these are unprecedented times and that art will see us through the most challenging days, I’d like to get down in the dirt and write honestly about the difficulty I had in creating this piece for you, how it has changed over time, and how I feel your responsibility has changed and will continue to evolve in the months to come.

When Jon first brought up the idea of a commission over the phone, I was thrilled. Before your recent performances of my music, I had seen your videos on social media and was stunned by the sound of this ensemble. My excitement only grew when Jon requested that I set Euan Tait’s poem Your name falls like rain from Poems for John. Euan’s work is known amongst composers for being a joy to set, and he and I have several overlapping acquaintances from my time in Scotland. So, I set to work in autumn of last year, fully expecting this piece to flow out of my brain like spring meltwater.

But in early March, news started to break of the progression of Covid-19 and the unimaginable toll it could have on humanity. As the United States quickly became the epicenter of a global crisis, we retreated into our homes to slow the spread. My weird little attic office, with its cracking plaster and uneven floorboards, began to feel more like a prison than the retreat that I had come to know it as. Above all, the death that Euan represented so viscerally in his poem was happening now, not in the past – and there was seemingly nothing I could do to stop it short of staying inside. The music that I  had composed in the fall just didn’t make sense to me anymore. How on Earth was I supposed to compose when the subject of the composition was such a moving target, and my own mind in such a state of confusion?

As time in quarantine wore on, it slowly became clear that my task as a composer with a duty to this ensemble had changed; that my new responsibility in the composing of this work was to address, somehow, the grief that so many individuals and families will be feeling when you convene at last to present your program to the American Choral Directors Association in Dallas. To reach from the ‘now’ to the ‘then’ – to feel the grief of love lost and long remembered so that, when the time comes, this piece might offer some small modicum of comfort to a broken person in that audience.

It was an impossible task – and I want to emphasize that I mean that literally, not figuratively. Not a one of us knows what this country and the world at large will look like when you deliver this program. Anyone who claims to have this information is either lying or is woefully misinformed. We don’t know how this ends. What we do know without a shadow of a doubt is that when that end comes, an enormous swath of humanity will be racked with grief – personal grief over the death of our loved ones, but also the broad, sickening grief of a world changed by pandemic.

Daunting as this task was, I had to start somewhere, so I reached back into my own past to find some kind of emotional anchor. In my own experiences with grief, some of the sharpest and most troubling moments come months and years after the moment of physical death. Those sudden remembrances that cause the mind to relive both the trauma of loss and the warmth of love in tandem. This is, I think, the concept that Euan conveys so effectively in the poem; the idea that grief is an internal pairing of motion and stasis, of arsis and thesis. It is dense, but not overwhelmingly negative – because what comes with the pain of loss is a universal thankfulness to have known the love that caused the pain.

You have all sung a portion of my Songs of the Questioner, which was written in the aftermath of the death of my grandmother, Esther. At twenty-four, she was my first real experience with death, and it seemed to set off a chain reaction of loss in my circle of loved ones. Grandma Florence. Aunt Betty. Robin Rahoi. A student of mine who ended his own life, whose name will not be mentioned here. My cat, Calliope. All of them died within the space of a year and a half or so when I was engaged in the stresses of a terminal degree in a foreign country. Throughout all of this, my work on Songs of the Questioner was a means of processing those losses. Interestingly, Jon Culpepper – in a keen moment of observation during one of our phone calls discussing this commission – pointed out that my use of hemiola in the work may have been a product of the internal density and conflict those deaths caused within me. Three against two, motion and stasis, arsis and thesis. Loss and love, together.

Armed with this new information about how I process grief as both a person and as a composer, I consciously leaned into similar rhythmic densities in Your name falls like rain. Not enough to overburden or over-texturalize the music, but enough to convey the eddies of internal turmoil that result from grief. The rhythmic motive of three against two is introduced in the opening statement from the English horn, an instrument chosen by Jon for its plaintive and human-like timbre. This initial statement can be considered as the “name” itself – the spoken word that causes the remembrance of a loved one. As the piece progresses, the relationship between the English horn and the choir unfolds as a process of searching and remembering, rooted in one of the most horrifying aspects of grief: the unbidden moments of being unable to remember the voice of the dead. “Ashthroat, wild bird” – the moment of greatest desperation occurring when the remembrance of that voice finally breaks through.

As the piece falls away from this moment of acuity, pain is replaced by longing: “that your final wounding will be met by a wounded mercy.” Here, we are transported into a place of warmth in the penultimate section of the work – but this warmth is short lived, as the knowledge of that soul being torn from its body quickly returns. In keeping with the final lines of Euan’s poem, I wanted the ending of this piece to feel distinctly plain, almost unfinished. The final page is unmetered, staves are cut away and there is no barline at the end. Instead, the final passage simply fades away into untethered space, English horn and piano slowly casting around each other, but unable to make real contact.

Just as my task as a composer has changed as the pandemic has progressed, I believe that your responsibility as artists and as an ensemble has changed significantly as well. In truth, your responsibility will continue to change over the coming year, and I have no earthly way of knowing what final form it will take. But I do know that the program that you will present at ACDA, deftly constructed and laid out for me a few weeks ago by your conductor, has the unmistakable potential to bring a measure of catharsis to a world that will need it badly. To help people who have been trapped in the long dark of loss find a way to step outside again.

If there’s any group of people that can deliver a program of such importance at such an important time, it is Dallas Chamber Choir. Your propensity for emotional connectivity is palpable at the best of times, and I know that this personal keenness will only become more focused by the prism of this pandemic. I hope that I have done right by you, and I hope that each of you finds a path through these dark times.    

Best wishes,

Thomas LaVoy

May 3rd, 2020

ii. Your name falls like rain

Your name falls like rain, all around me,
increasing in power, erupting the ground
as flashes of music, your name
a refreshing, and grief’s cry of pain
that love cannot answer. To remember
who you are in the echo-sounds
of this day’s awakening: ashthroat,
wild-bird, the splash of your singing,
dawn itself a firebird of first light,
its great wings far-spreading flame.

My longing: that your final wounding
will be met by a wounded mercy
that catches your falling life,
and our music is the flare
we light here, weaving our music
into the torn-out threads
of your beginning, your unfinished life.

Euan Tait, from Poems for John
                       

© Euan Tait, used with permission.