Introductory comments for “ALL THE DESANCTIFIED PLACES,” delivered before our premiere of the piece April 9, 2017, at SPACE Gallery in Portland, on the concluding concert of the Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival.
This is a big piece you’re about to hear, around eighteen minutes long, and I want to take an additional four minutes or so to introduce it to you.
“All the Desanctified Places” is my musical translation of the first part of a long poem by Robert Bringhurst called “New World Suite No. 3.” The principal theme is the devastation of the earth and indigenous American cultures that resulted from the arrival of Europeans in the New World. Here, for example, are some lines about the Amazon basin:
Up the Xingu and Uraricoera:
the ashes still warm and the blood still fresh
in the logging slash, and the featureless mud
of the goldfields pulped with a high-pressure hose.
All over the world,
the earth is tortured for money.
The poem criticizes missionaries and their use of the Holy Book to destroy native people’s spiritual connection to the earth, as in this passage:
Weaned from the earth, we are fed
on the eggwhite and sugar of visions
of life after death in a different world,
not on the meat of the knowledge that this
is that different world.
…
This hunger for life everlasting will kill us.
But the poem concludes with what seems a suggestion of hope:
… there is a song I thought you should hear,
and a story that tells where to find it. …
Year after year it sings itself farther
under the mountain. And year after year
we dance it back out again.
If the hills dance, we dance too.
The original poem is unusual in that it is written for three voices. Sometimes they take turns speaking, but more often, two or three of them speak at the same time. It’s polyphonic, in other words. On the page, the three lines are superimposed so you can see their relationships as the poem goes along, just like a musical score.
In one of his essays, Bringhurst writes “Would the ideal reader for this poem have three eyes or three heads so he could read three parts at once? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.… The ideal reader for this poem, it seems to me, is not a person with three heads, but a person with two friends, who will all come together to speak it aloud.”
As you can see, I’ve got two friends—new friends, actually—Tracey and Bryan. They’ve been enthusiastic collaborators in working out the challenges of learning a piece where we have to speak and play at the same time. I am grateful to both of them.
Thanks also to another new friend, Robert Bringhurst, for this remarkable poem he’s allowed me to play around with. We’ve shared many emails over the past few months between my home in South Portland and his home on Quadra Island in British Columbia. Just a couple hours ago, we met in person for the first time. I still can hardly believe it, and the circumstances that made it possible, but Robert decided he wanted to be here for this performance, so he changed his airline tickets in order to fly to the East Coast a few days early for a lecture he’s scheduled to give in Boston on Tuesday.
And there he is. Welcome to Maine, Robert.
Some of you may know that Bringhurst is also one of the world’s leading authorities on typography. Books, as aesthetic objects, are important to him. But he constantly reminds us that the design and typography of a book should be at the service of its contents. In that regard, I want to close with a quotation from Robert that could have been written specifically about today’s National Poetry Month concert. He says “A poem is most itself when it is spoken, as a life is most itself when it is lived and a piece of music is most itself when it is played. The printed text should be as fine as it can be, but it should never be the final incarnation. A book must be a place where things begin.”