Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Composed for the Rutgers University Voorhees Choir and Stephanie Tubiolo

Premiere: April 2025 at Nicholas Music Center (New Brunswick, NJ)
Rutgers University Voorhees Choir; Stephanie Tubiolo, conductor

MEDIA

NOTE

In the years immediately following the Second World War, a group of poets gathered in Germany to examine the cultural and philosophical conditions which led to the catastrophe that had engulfed Europe. Among these was a young Austrian poet, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973), whose primary concerns included the ideas of truth and discernment. Through her work, she questioned how her culture could have so fundamentally lost its ability to discern the difference between true and false or real and unreal.

In her estimation, this inability to distinguish and name the real was a direct contributing factor to the emergence of totalitarianism. In our own time, I fear that we are living through a similar crisis of truth.

As we face these uncertain times, one of the most important things we can do as individuals is to commit to the idea of telling the truth about the world around us in small ways each and every day (even when these small truths contradict or complicate the larger narratives to which we have committed ourselves).

To create the text for this work, I selected, edited, and freely adapted fragments from the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. Between each of these fragments, I have  interspersed lines from Psalm 102 which speak to the human ability to endure trial and suffering.

Musically, I chose the form of the chorale. I was drawn to this form because of its emphasis on the intelligibility of text and the capacity of harmonic  and dynamic choices to shade and underscore the  interpretation of those texts. Each of these short fragments deals with the emotional landscape of a world that has lost its connection with the real. The images I find in these fragments speak powerfully to the uncertainty of the present moment.

TEXT

Composite text by Scott Ordway after Ingeborg Bachmann and Psalm 102

i.

Harder days are coming.
Borrowed time
Appears on the horizon.
Soon you will lace up your shoes
And drive the dogs back to the marshes…

The lupines burn with feeble light.
Your glance cuts through the fog.
Borrowed time
Appears on the horizon.

Don’t look around.
Lace up your shoes.

Harder days are coming.

ii.

I have eaten ashes like bread,
and mingled my drink with tears.
I am lifted up, and cast down.
My days are like a shadow; and I am withered like grass.

iii.

You have closed my eyes
with sea breeze and oak leaf;
on the tears I cried
you let the grasses feed;
out of my dreams, suns dared
to venture across the land,
yet everything disappeared
as soon as your day began.
Everything remained unspoken.

In place of you I see
the soul of my country succumb.

iv.

I forget to eat my bread.
My bones cleave to my skin.
I am a bird of the wilderness:
I am an owl of the desert.

v.

We lie again
on the chaff of scorn, in time’s autumn maneuver.
And the escape southward isn’t feasible for us
as it is for the birds.

vi.

Let us hear the prayer of the destitute,
and not despise their prayer.
Let us hear the cry of the prisoner;
and those that are appointed to death.

vii.

Salt and bread.

Now the wind sends its rails ahead;
we will follow in slow trains
and inhabit these islands…

the tides of truth
will be no more rare.

Of the great storms of light,
none has come to life.
So I gather the salt
when the sea overcomes us,
and turn back
and lay it on the threshold
and step into the house.

We share bread with the rain;
bread, a debt, and a house.

viii.

I have eaten ashes like bread,
and mingled my drink with tears.
My days are like a shadow;
and I am withered like grass.

ix.

These days I rise with the birches
and brush the corn hair from my brow
before a mirror of ice…

These days I feel no pain
that I can forget
or that I must remember.

On the horizon…
My beautiful land
just over there, releasing me
wrapped in a shroud.

I live, and from afar, I hear its last song.