Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by the Lorelei Ensemble with support from a NewMusicUSA Project Grant

Premiere: November 2014 at Marsh Chapel (Boston, MA)
Lorelei Ensemble; Beth Willer, conductor

PRESS

“Exquisite.” —New York Times

“An American response to Sibelius.” —Boston Globe

“Haunting and really lovely.” —Boston Musical Intelligencer

“Wild and distant, austere and stalwart…Ordway’s writing was both confident and delicate…Lorelei flourished in the evocative soundscapes and velvet harmonies.” —Boston Classical Review

MEDIA

NOTE

I created the concept for North Woods in 2013 when I was living near the coast in southern Maine. While ostensibly a response to the vast, uninhabited wilderness at the northern extremity of the state, the piece is most directly connected to the spiritual and aesthetic lives of a more abstract “North.”

The text is adapted from two works by the Roman historian Tacitus. In Germania and Agricola (both ca. 98 A.D.), the author describes territories to the north of the Roman Empire. He was ignorant in two important ways, though: he had never personally traveled to either Britain or the German lands, and he didn’t understand how the planet was shaped or how it related to the sun. Because of this, his writings about the North are infused with an almost mystical reverence that still feels intuitively correct. Vast woods and waters shrouded in endless twilight acquire a moral significance that grows from the landscape itself: because they are frozen and dark, they are unwelcoming to humanity, and this makes them pure. This, to me, is the idea of the North, and it resounds everywhere in the way that people discuss the far northern peripheries of the places they live and know.

The music is in four parts: there are three representations of the idea of the North, followed by a short appendix wherein each text is treated again in a more sanguine, earthbound, and articulate style.

TEXT

Text by Scott Ordway, after Tacitus

I.


The nights are not dark;
 the
Earth casts only a low shadow.

The level edge does not project the
Darkness high aloft

(and so) the shades of night do not
Reach the sky and stars above. [Ag. 2]

II.


To the north of it no land

Exists whatever, and upon that
Face beat the waves of a

Vast and shoreless sea. [Ag. 10]


And the rivers bend gently away
To lose themselves in the
Northern Ocean. [Ger. 1]

III.


They do not imprison their gods
Within walls, or represent them with
Human features; 
 Instead, they consecrate
Woods and groves,

And they call by the name of reverence. [Ger. 9]

IV.

Appendices I. II. III.


Sources: Tacitus: Agricola and Germania (both ca. 98 A.D.)