Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.

“Alleluia,” by Nathaniel Bellows.

Sea of cradle, foundling,
current, cold and quelled as morning.
Braid of vapored ashes,
shadowed creche, collapsing.

Contour, carve, corrode—
breathe through camphor, coal,
seed each breeze with gold.
Poison, parch, pollute—
plow the coast, the dune,
flow toward constant moon.

Alleluia

Hearth of stone, of tar, of lava,
shelter shielding mother.
Oh, save us mother!

She who is sleeping,
Is she who will wake.

Fracture, foist, defoul—
shatter cliff and shoal,
sand each stone to whole.
Harbored, held, unharmed—
she’ll wake, rise, rejoin,
her daughters and her sons.

Alleluia

This is a text by the poet and visual artist and musician Nathaniel Bellows, who’s based in New York City. And it’s a name that you might be familiar with if you’ve listened to any of my episodes.

I did an episode on a wonderful piece from a song cycle called Unremembered. It used text by Nathaniel Bellows and music by Sarah Kirkland Snider, just as this episode does. The two of them have collaborated a number of times, not just on Unremembered, but also on a large choral and orchestral work called Mass for the Endangered. And this episode today is about one movement from that piece.

The text to the work mingles words from the traditional Latin Mass—the Gloria, the Sanctus and Benedictus, and parts of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei—with texts written by Nathaniel Bellows. Some movements mingle text within a single movement, and others, like this movement, use only Nathaniel Bellows’s words.

This past spring, I was lucky to get to host a book club for the Oregon Bach Festival. The Oregon Bach Festival performed Mass for the Endangered this summer. And before the first meeting of the book club, I asked them to just read the text and then come in with ideas.

What struck me is that pretty much everyone in the group zeroed in on the text to this particular movement. They were fascinated with it. They were deeply moved by it, befuddled by parts of it, and we spent much of our first meeting trying to understand the significance of this beautiful and powerful text.

One of the things that struck us is that although this text is not overtly religious, it uses biblical images.

For example, in the very first stanza, we hear:

Sea of cradle, foundling

And at the end of that stanza, we hear:

shadowed creche, collapsing.

So a creche—we’ll start there—is simply another name for a nativity scene, a scene depicting Jesus’s birth. “Cradle,” of course, brings to mind Jesus in the manger, and the word “foundling” refers to an abandoned infant.

So what Nathaniel Bellows has brought to mind here is a nativity scene where the child in that scene—call it Jesus, call it the earth, call it Mother Nature—is in the creche, is in the cradle, but also in a threatened state. The child has been abandoned, there are vapored ashes all around, and the creche is collapsing.

That sense of threat is even more noticeable in the next stanza, which goes like this:

Contour, carve, corrode—
breathe through camphor, coal,
seed each breeze with gold.
Poison, parch, pollute—
plow the coast, the dune,
flow toward constant moon.

Notice the alliterative punch of the C and P sounds in this stanza: “Contour, carve, corrode,” “Poison, parch, pollute.”

We hear those violent, percussive Cs in the words “camphor, coal” in the next line. And those two words make us think of the destruction of natural resources.

Camphor is a chemical that used to be made from distilling the wood of the camphor tree. And by the nineteenth century, natural reserves of the camphor tree were depleted. And of course, coal is something that’s taken from the earth with terrible environmental impacts.

After these two stanzas—the first about a creche among vapored ashes, the second about the poisoning of the earth—we have a single word in its own stanza, so to speak, and that word is:

Alleluia

You don’t have to be a religious person to know that the word alleluia is a word of praise. Think of being outside and it’s cloudy, and then finally the sun appears, and you say, “Alleluia.”

Which is why it’s so strange that this word, this word of praise, falls at this point in this text. And remember, of course, that this entire movement is called “Alleluia.”

What is there to be thankful for in the context of this poem? How are we to understand this word?

Is it meant to be read ironically, as though saying there’s nothing to be thankful for, but uttering this word so that it conveys the exact opposite of its literal meaning?

Or is it meant to sound like an exhausted alleluia, a kind of last-breath alleluia? We’re saying it with all the energy we can muster, even though everything is collapsing around us.

I don’t think we should feel we have to choose between these two readings. That’s one of the great joys, after all, of reading anything or listening to anything. You get to bring your own perspective and see how it interacts with the perspective of the poet and the composer and others who are experiencing this work of art.

I will say that from my perspective, the word alleluia sounds pretty ironic after these first two destructive stanzas, but my sense of the meaning of this word changes when I read the rest of the poem.

Here’s the next stanza:

Hearth of stone, of tar, of lava,
shelter shielding mother.
Oh, save us mother!

What wonderful lines these are. And they’re full of so many rich and meaningful words, and words that change a bit from what we’ve heard before.

I’m thinking of a word like “hearth,” which is the place around a fire, a place of coziness.

Then there’s tar and lava. These can also be destructive, of course. Tar is a black, viscous liquid, and lava is magma flowing from the earth. But they also have a creative force.

Volcanoes occur in places like the Hawaiian Islands where new earth, new island chains, are being created. And tar also has a kind of preserving quality.

When I was a kid, I grew up in Iowa. We took a long trip to the West Coast, and we went to the La Brea Tar Pits in California. These are tar pits that have preserved the bones of animals that died thousands and thousands of years ago.

This is a place of preservation, a place of shelter, to borrow a word from the next line of the poem:

shelter shielding mother.

This word “mother” also really draws our attention.

Remember that at the beginning of the poem, we have a foundling, so an abandoned child, a child without parents, without a mother. And here the word “mother” appears in a stanza about hearth, shelter, preservation.

And there’s a plea to this mother figure. Think of it as Mother Nature or Mother God, or whatever that word brings to your mind:

Oh, save us mother!

Then come two lines which are the most meaning-filled lines in the poem, the ones that I think occupied our book club for a good ten minutes, and that are italicized as if to emphasize their importance:

She who is sleeping,
Is she who will wake.

What do these lines mean?

Again, there are many different possible answers to this question.

You might think of it from a Christian perspective and imagine that this sleeping and then waking is something akin to resurrection.

Or you could think of it as referring to the hopeful reversal of climate change. Our world is being destroyed, we are destroying it, but we are making efforts to reverse course and bring it back to life again.

You might even think of this on an even larger timescale. And not to be too grim here, but imagine that we don’t reverse the effects of climate change, that we do destroy ourselves and even the earth. But after that, there may be a renewal. The universe will go on. The forces that create new worlds will continue. Nature, in the largest sense, will win out.

No matter which of these views rings most true to you, there’s something in the end of this poem that changes our understanding of that word alleluia.

Maybe we’re not meant to hear the word as ironic, but instead as heartfelt, however muted. Maybe, despite the poisoning, parching, and polluting, there’s something small that we can hold onto that gives us hope.

The last lines of the poem, after all, leave us with an image of this feminine figure in a safe place and then rising to a new life:

Harbored, held, unharmed—
she’ll wake, rise, rejoin,
her daughters and her sons.

“Alleluia,” by Nathaniel Bellows.

Sea of cradle, foundling,
current, cold and quelled as morning.
Braid of vapored ashes,
shadowed creche, collapsing.

Contour, carve, corrode—
breathe through camphor, coal,
seed each breeze with gold.
Poison, parch, pollute—
plow the coast, the dune,
flow toward constant moon.

Alleluia

Hearth of stone, of tar, of lava,
shelter shielding mother.
Oh, save us mother!

She who is sleeping,
Is she who will wake.

Fracture, foist, defoul—
shatter cliff and shoal,
sand each stone to whole.
Harbored, held, unharmed—
she’ll wake, rise, rejoin,
her daughters and her sons.

Alleluia

And now here is Sarah Kirkland Snider’s setting of Nathaniel Bellows’s text from Mass for the Endangered.

[Music excerpt]

Sarah Kirkland Snider is quite simply one of my favorite living composers. She’s a composer who lives in Princeton and has worked extensively on the East Coast and has had music performed throughout the world.

She’s especially known for her vocal works, and I love her vocal works. She has a great sense for the human voice. She sets text beautifully.

She has written a couple of genre-defying orchestral song cycles which mingle indie-pop style with classical style. One is called Penelope, about the long-suffering wife of Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey, and the other is Unremembered, the cycle that she wrote with Nathaniel Bellows.

Snider is currently working on an opera called Hildegard, about the twelfth-century visionary composer Hildegard von Bingen, on a libretto that Snider is writing herself, and I can’t wait for this work to come out.

Snider wrote Mass for the Endangered along with Nathaniel Bellows in 2018. And as I mentioned, it was performed at the Oregon Bach Festival last summer, and I got to hear it live for the first time, and I was floored.

It’s the kind of piece that moves you in ways that you can hardly even fathom and sticks with you.

I thought that the best way to explain what the piece is like is to use Sarah Kirkland Snider’s words. These are lines from her program notes to the piece.

And she begins by talking about the Latin Mass in general. She says this:

“The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine, which in the Catholic tradition is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life, animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention, but that appeal is directed not to God, but rather to nature itself.”

The movement you just heard, “Alleluia,” is the third movement of six, and the entire piece is about forty minutes long.

One thing you may have noticed when you listened, especially because I talked so much about this word alleluia, is how Sarah Kirkland Snider sets it.

It sounds muted, introverted, introspective, hesitant—the furthest thing from triumphant. And the furthest thing from the way this word is typically set by classical composers.

Here are two famous examples. The first comes from Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah, and the second comes from Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate.

[Music excerpts]

Snider’s handling of this word is the polar opposite of what you just heard.

She sets it to just one note, repeated tentatively, almost whispered, while just three string voices sound beneath it: two violin parts and violas.

[Music excerpt]

The passage you just heard is from the middle of the movement, but the beginning of the movement sounds exactly the same. We hear this same three-part string texture, and Snider writes in the score, “introspective, gently brooding.”

This is such a wonderfully minimalistic beginning. It’s like a backdrop that’s lacking much color until the voices come in.

You’ll first hear basses, and then another bass voice, and then tenors singing the opening lines of the poem. And they’re kind of wandering and repeating the same gestures again and again.

[Music excerpt]

When I listen to this opening, I picture the aftermath of a forest fire, kind of like a parched landscape with smoke swirling above. That’s the moving voices. I think of the vapored ashes in Nathaniel Bellows’s poem.

Another image that comes to mind is a vast, motionless, dark ocean with, say, moonlight gently scattering its light across the surface. And here again, I’m thinking of words in the poem, the first three words:

Sea of cradle

No matter what image you think of, this is music that sounds ominous, still, but waiting for something to happen.

That something happens in the next section of the movement, the section that sets the next stanza of the poem, the one starting:

Contour, carve, corrode—
breathe through camphor, coal.

Snider emphasizes those C sounds by repeating them on gestures that begin on the same pitch that we heard on “Alleluia,” F-sharp.

[Music excerpt]

But what stands out to me even more than these repeated gestures and emphasized consonants are the new instrumental colors. New sounds come in.

Previously we heard just strings, but now we hear flute, clarinet, bassoon, then harp and vibraphone. Later an oboe comes in, and the women in the choir, who have been sitting silent up to this point, begin to sing.

You’ll hear them on:

Poison, parch, pollute

echoing the melodies that the men have been singing.

[Music excerpt]

Above the voices, Snider writes the words “warm, earthy,” and there is indeed a kind of warmth to this enriched orchestral sound. But there’s also a real bite, a piercing quality.

I hear this most in the upper woodwinds. Just listen for the first three notes in the bassoon, the clarinet, and the flute, in that order from bottom to top. You’ll hear three different notes.

These notes.

[Music demonstration]

This is music that does opposite things at the same time. It’s warm but has this kind of cold, biting quality. It feels gentle but also threatening.

And it makes me think of a line that I read in an interview with Sarah Kirkland Snider from a Gramophone profile just published a couple years ago. The writer describes her music as familiar yet at the same time strange and unsettling.

And those words perfectly capture what it’s like to listen to this passage.

For the next stanza of the poem—and this is the stanza that falls after the single word “Alleluia”—Sarah Kirkland Snider uses the music that we heard at the beginning of the song. It’s basically a varied repetition of that music.

And the stanza here is:

Hearth of stone, of tar, of lava,
shelter shielding mother.
Oh, save us mother!

I’ll play this passage, and what I want you to listen for is what happens at the very end of it.

Something totally new enters, and that is the harp arpeggiating, and then a single soprano voice, the only solo voice in the entire movement, sings those crucial words:

She who is sleeping,
Is she who will wake.

[Music excerpt]

Sarah Kirkland Snider told me that when she was first working with Nathaniel Bellows on this movement, she decided that the music needed something tender, something sweet, something positive in the middle.

And so what she did was take out her phone and sing this melody without words.

She sent the audio to Nathaniel Bellows, and he then came up with the words that go with this melody.

We often think of a composer setting a text, but actually in these kinds of collaborative efforts, it’s much more fluid. This is a case where we might say that Nathaniel Bellows set words to the music.

What follows this tender, innocent-sounding melody is also a surprise.

Earlier I talked about Sarah Kirkland Snider’s ability to mix opposites. We have the stasis of the beginning with the three string parts and the motion of the voices above. We have a kind of earthy, warm orchestral sound with piercing sounds above it.

Well, here we have pure beauty, absolute crystalline beauty, followed by fear, something close to terror.

The oboe picks up the same pitch from the soprano, a C, and then crescendos from double piano to double forte, and then all of the winds and the harp and the strings come in in absolute, kind of shuddering dissonance.

[Music excerpt]

What follows this is music just like what we heard earlier in the movement, a repetition of an earlier section.

We heard music for “Contour, carve, corrode” earlier, and the same music returns for “Fracture, foist, defoul.”

This seems only natural because the last stanza in the poem, the one starting “Fracture, foist, defoul,” is a kind of echo of the second stanza, the one beginning “Contour, carve, corrode.”

And we can even hear the repeated alliterative sounds at the beginning of each of those stanzas.

But what does surprise me a bit is that Sarah Kirkland Snider continues in this rather threatening vein through to the end of the movement.

Recall that I discussed the last lines of the poem—

Harbored, held, unharmed—
she’ll wake, rise, rejoin,
her daughters and her sons.

—and suggested that they give a different meaning to the word alleluia. They give it a kind of hopeful quality and suggest that there might be something like a kind of rebirth that we can look forward to.

Well, what’s interesting is that the music to the movement doesn’t fully embrace what I hear, anyway, as that touch of hopefulness at the end.

Here’s the music to that last stanza, and notice that it not only repeats what we heard previously in the second stanza, but that the movement ends just as it began.

[Music excerpt]

What’s the effect of this return to the beginning?

Well, it has many different effects.

To me, it suggests a larger cycle. We begin and then we end just as we began, as though we’re moving through another cycle, whether that’s a life cycle or a broader cycle, a kind of geologic cycle.

The rebirth, the renewal that we’re hoping for is not something that can happen instantaneously. It’s something that will require multiple efforts, multiple turns of the wheel, multiple revolutions of the earth and the stars.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is only the third movement of six. We’re just partway through the larger Mass for the Endangered.

So we can await a kind of resolution that comes later. And indeed it does.

The piece doesn’t end triumphantly. In fact, it ends very much like it began in the first movement. So the entire work is a kind of cycle.

But there’s an even stronger sense of hopefulness at the end of the entire work.

There are a few lines that really stand out to me in this way. At the end, in the final movement, we hear these words.

[Music/text excerpt]

Is this a desire or is it a promise? It’s really hard to tell.

And again, it’s because of the wonderful ambivalence of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s music. Her knack for writing what we might call, in the simplest terms, “both-and” music.

Music that is at once richly complex and also, when it really needs to be, startlingly simple. Music that is both troubled and innocent, both despairing at times and also hopeful, both heartbreaking and, as we hear in this movement and so often throughout this Mass, purely, consolingly beautiful.

And here, once again, is “Alleluia” from Mass for the Endangered.

[Music excerpt]

Thank you to New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records for giving me permission to use this recording of “Alleluia.” It appears on an album of the entire Mass by the ensemble Gallicantus, conducted by Gabriel Crouch.

Special thanks to Sarah Kirkland Snider and Nathaniel Bellows for sharing their insights about their work with me, to the members of the Oregon Bach Festival Book Club, who taught me so much about this piece, and especially to Sarah for taking the time to visit with us this past spring.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.com. And if you like what you’ve heard, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, or even sharing this episode with someone who you think will also enjoy this music.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Steve Rodgers. Thank you for listening.