healing measures

SATB Double Choir

healing measure is a movement of a larger work based on mass ordinaries called there’s something i have to say and serves as a stand-in for the “Gloria.” That text always felt to me like a euphoric sweeping-away of the pleas for mercy in the “Kyrie”; as if the first beams of light begin to appear through the sorrow or the commonplace.  The words of thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi (1207-1273) are presented in a legendary English translation by American poet Coleman Barks (b. 1973); words of praise and grief; gratitude and play. 

Alongside Rumi’s poetry is a text by American poet Robert W. Ressler (b. 1988) about a process called nixtamalization during which corn is prepared in such a way that adds nutritional value, detoxifies it, and adds a more enticing flavor and aroma.  Here, this marvel of indigenous science is used as a metaphor for the process of becoming healthy again.

healing measures was commissioned by The Choral Project (Daniel Hughes, conductor) and is dedicated to the composer Nico Muhly, whose added-note chords in circular patterns always feel so effective to me at holding an ecstatic moment.

The Text

Nixtamalization
Use what is near you.
Use what came before you.
Cleanse.
This may involve heat.
It may take a while.
You will be bathed in it.
Ground down by hand.
Combined with what you like.
Formed to what is best for you.

By Robert Ressler (b. 1988)

Excerpts from Rumi

Don’t just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in.

Where lowland is, that’s where water goes.
All medicine wants is pain to cure.
Give your weakness to one who helps.

Conscious decisions and personal memory
are much too small a place to live

Something opens your wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.

Inside this new love, die.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. 
Die, and be quiet.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it.

I know this with all certainty.
I know this with my soul and proof is not required.

Translations of Rumi (1207-1273) by Coleman Barks (b. 1937)
Used with kind permission