Part 1 introduces the chord structure that governs the entire piece, and ends with the repeated words, “only your will is your own.” The second and third parts, loosely dealing with the Devil and the importance of choosing one’s words, are based on drones generated by the voices and the strings; the constant (but slightly morphing) texture is meant to be meditative and vague. I have always wanted to set the Beatitudes, and Craig has paraphrased them beautifully here; the tenors intone the word “blessed” over and over while the strings and winds reiterate the passacaglia from the opening of the piece. The fifth and final part is a series of proverbs. The orchestra begins in a series of loose, ecstatic drones, which increase in intensity (“Make your own family!”) until we jump suddenly to the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ was betrayed while his disciples slept. “Why are you sleeping? Couldn’t you stay awake for one more hour?” he asks, while the strings and winds lazily chant in the background.

MORTIFICATION
How soon doth man decay! When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets, Which do consigne and send them unto death.

When boyes go first to bed, They step into their voluntarie graves;
Sleep bindes them fast; onely their breath Makes them not dead.
Successive nights, like rolling waves, Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

When youth is frank and free, And calls for musick, while his veins do swell,
All day exchanging mirth and breath In companie;
That musick summons to the knell, Which shall befriend him at the houre of death.
When man grows staid and wise, Getting a house and home, where he may move
Within the circle of his breath, Schooling his eyes;
That dumbe inclosure maketh love Unto the coffin, that attends his death.

When age grows low and weak, Marking his grave, and thawing ev’ry yeare,
Till all do melt, and drown his breath When he would speak;
A chair or litter shows the biere, Which shall convey him to the house of death.

Man, ere he is aware, Hath put together a somemnitie,
And drest his herse, while he has breath As yet to spare.
Yet Lord, instruct us so to die That all these dyings may be life in death.
—GEORGE HERBERT

There once was a Bird and there once was a Dog,
And the bird was Despondent, or sad,
A pensive frown on her Busy beak,
No matter that Cake could be had.

The Goat suggested a Convertible drive,
To purchase a cheering up Hat,
At a Haberdashery with a Scarlet door,
And a Baby to sell them just that.

The hats have Panache, of course, of course,
A sense of excitement and style,
The Mezzo-Soprano is done with her song,
So let’s all just eat for a while.

Tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la,
And sing those tra las once more.
Tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la,
Try not to get crumbs on the floor.

-Lemony Snicket

Recorded by Eve Gigliotti and Nico Muhly.

Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like “See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the prick of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. This piece, Motion, tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello criss-cross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody “in the sight of multitudes a glorious ascension.”

The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: “the blind have sight and cripples have their motion” – the word “motion,” in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.

PART I THE HEREAFTER (1892)
I believe in the Hereafter. Material appetites or love for the real don’t beguile me. It’s not habit but instinct. The heavenly word will be added
to life’s imperfect sentence, otherwise inane. Respite and reward will follow upon action. When sight is forevermore closed to Creation,
the eye will be opened in the presence of the Creator. An immortal wave of life will flow from each and every Gospel of Christ—wave of life uninterrupted.

NEAR AN OPEN WINDOW
In the stillness of an autumn night, I sit near an open window, for entire hours, in a perfect, voluptuous tranquility.
The gentle rainfall of the leaves descends.
The keening of the perishable world resounds within my perishable nature,
but is a dulcet keening, rising like a prayer. My window opens up an unknown world. A fount of fragrant memories, unutterable, appears before me.
Against my window wings are beating—chill autumnal exhalations
approach me and encircle me and in their holy tongue they speak to me.
I feel vague and wide-embracing hopes; and in the hallowed silence of creation, my ears hear melodies,
hear the crystalline, the mystic music of the chorus of the stars.

PART II SEPTEMBER OF 1903 (1904)
At least let me be deceived by delusions, now, so that I might not feel my empty life. And I was so close so many times. And how I froze, and how I was afraid;
why should I remain with lips shut tight; while within me weeps my empty life, and my longings wear their mourning black. To be, so many times, so close
to the eyes, and to the sensual lips, to the dreamed of, beloved body. To be, so many times, so close.

JANUARY OF 1904 (1904)
Ah this January, this January’s nights,
when I sit and refashion in my thoughts those moments and I come upon you, and I hear our final words, and hear the first.
This January’s despairing nights, when the vision goes and leaves me all alone. How swiftly it departs and melts away— the trees go, the streets go, the houses go, the lights go: it fades and disappears, your erotic shape.
PART III 27 JUNE 1906, 2 P. M. (1908)
When the Christians brought him to be hanged, the innocent boy of seventeen, his mother, who there beside the scaffold had dragged herself and lay beaten on the ground beneath the midday sun, the savage sun,
now would moan, and howl like a wolf, a beast, and then the martyr, overcome, would keen “Seventeen years only you lived with me, my child.” And when they took him up the scaffold’s steps and passed the rope around him and strangled him, the innocent boy, seventeen years old,
and piteously it hung inside the void, with the spasms of black agony— the youthful body, beautifully wrought— his mother, martyr, wallowed on the ground and now she keened no more about his years: “Seventeen days only,” she keened, “seventeen days only I had joy of you, my child.”

IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (1897)
There is one joy alone, but one that’s blessed, one consolation only in this pain. How many thronging tawdry days were missed because of this ending; how much ennui.
A poet has said: “The loveliest music is the one that cannot be played.” And I, I daresay that by far the best life is the one that cannot be lived.
—C.P. CAVAFY
translated by Daniel Mendelsohn