Misercordia (2023) for soprano, Violin, and Cello
Program Note
Misericordia was written in homage to Christopher Cairns on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The musical impulses of the piece stem from a constellation of thoughts, feelings, and impressions I’ve had over the years of Cairn’s work, and is therefore a general response to the experience of encountering it.
While my piece doesn’t respond to a particular work of Chris’s, I’ve always been drawn to his sculptures cast in bronze. Some of them seem profoundly sullen, as if to show the weight of the material in which they are cast. Others, such as Floating Figure, appear weightless. Both are cast austerely in bronze, yet they have two very different affects. I wanted to play with a similar duality in my piece by using the same material (resonant, spectrally-informed sonorities which I liken to a kind of sonic weightiness) for moments both delicate and brutal.
The text is comprised of passages from the Book of Psalms (sung in the Latin Vulgate translation) which I feel traverse a similar psychological terrain to that of Cairn’s oeuvre. Theses verses depict, like much of Cairns’s art, raw moments of human frailty; moments of devastation being experienced in real time without the guarantee of future restoration.