Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by Joshua Halpern and the Cultural Caravan

Premiere: 13 June 2025 at Mountain View United Methodist Church (Boulder, CO)

MEDIA

NOTE

It is the wintertime of 2024 going into 2025. As I look out at the world from my vantage point as an artist, as a teacher, and as a father to two young girls, it would be easy to feel frightened or angry or paralyzed. I would have good reason to do so. My problem, however, is that these feelings are not in my nature.

At the deepest level, I am continually amazed by and in love with the world and the people in it and I cannot pretend otherwise. This feeling that the world is boundless and radiant and that we can move freely through it or rise above it is obviously an illusion. But the feeling remains. And it gets me out of bed in the morning. And it brings me to the piano to create things which I hope will become meaningful to others. And it brings me to the classroom and to the studio where I strive to help other artists find their own voices and the technique through which to express them. And it makes me so happy to be a parent and to share my life with two incredible young people.

When I think, then, of what I want to tell my daughters, they aren’t words of caution to help them endure a difficult world: the world’s difficulties are impossible to ignore. Instead, I want to share with them the irrational but undeniable sense of wonder and joy and possibility that animates me to do those things of which I am proudest: to create, to teach, to explore the world, to connect with people, to take a few risks from time to time, and to be open and uninhibited and free.

As our social and ecological worlds undergo profound transformations, I want to express these ideas now. But my daughters are very young. They may understand them in time, but they will not participate in their full relevance until they are older. And so I want to put them down in a form which means something to me (and perhaps to a wider audience) now, and which may mean something to them later when they encounter them and are old enough to understand.

This project is comprised of a series of letters to my two young daughters and a corresponding series of movements for cello and piano that I composed in response to these letters. I have combined the forms of letters and music because I am a musician and because I want to explore the place where creativity meets the world we all live in.

By integrating these letters into my music, I hope to accomplish two things. I can share this feeling of irrational hope with a wider audience who may need to hear it right now. And I can preserve it in a format which may mean something to my daughters when they are old enough to take something real from it. The project operates on these two timelines: in the immediate present and in a highly uncertain future.

My instincts as an artist and my instincts as a parent are both similar and intertwined: they are expressions of my values and beliefs and aspirations for how good the world has the potential to be. While these letters and the music they inspire are for my daughters, they explore themes of curiosity, creation, and openness that I believe people of all ages and backgrounds might value.

Lastly: I am grateful to create this work in collaboration with Josh Halpern, one of few musicians whose energy, personality, and values match those of this project. In addition to his extraordinary gifts as a cellist, he is a person with a rare and inexhaustible supply of exuberance, joy, and humor. I cannot know with certainty, but I suspect he shares some of the intuitions which compelled me to create this work. Ours is a world which only occasionally rewards sincerity: if I’m to make something that others might find overly earnest, I prefer to do it in good company.

Scott Ordway
May 2025

THE LETTERS

FIRST LETTER

Dear Sophie and Nora,

There are many things in our personal and collective lives which remain out of reach. Some things, like athletic or musical excellence, are out of our reach because they are notoriously difficult for individuals to achieve. I once wanted to be a professional baseball player, but I am not one because I was not good enough at baseball. I am not a great pianist (although I appreciate that you think I am) because I didn’t practice the piano enough when I was young. Other things, like curing cancer or fusing atoms together or traveling to other stars are beyond our capacity as humans, or at least they are in 2025 as I write this letter to you.

But there is a wide field of action that is possible between these personal and global challenges. In this opening are things which we avoid because nobody has organized the rest of us to do them. So much of the richness and beauty and connectedness in life happens at this overlooked, unloved medium scale.

There is a thought experiment that I think of often, but have never put into action because I do not have the energy or the willpower. Maybe someday I will. I imagine a day on which the citizens of Philadelphia, where we live, agree to ring every bell in the whole city all at once: the bells of the churches and cathedrals, of course, but also the little bells that people have in their homes and the old-fashioned alarm clocks and the decorative sleigh bells for Christmastime and all the rest of them, on and on, large and small. This festival of bells would be spectacularly beautiful, but we haven’t done it. It does not evade us on a technical level: we know how to make and ring bells. It does not evade us on a financial level: the bells already exist and it costs nothing to ring them. It doesn’t require new forms of social or political organization: all of our society’s problems would still be there the day after we rang the bells. It’s just something that would be exquisitely lovely but which we haven’t done because nobody has helped us do it.

Last year, there was a total solar eclipse which passed over some parts of our country. You both watched it at school using these silly cardboard goggles which millions of us bought, used once, and then threw away. My colleagues and I watched it while laying on the lawn behind my office—something which we would never have done under any other circumstances—where you sometimes do cartwheels when you come to visit me at work. We felt the warmth of the sun disappear and saw the stars and heard the animals which usually only come out at dusk. Some people who experienced it described understanding their relationship to the cosmos in a completely new way, a moment where the hidden relationships between things on a vast, inhuman scale were suddenly made visible.

Unexpected, large-scale acts of cooperation do the same thing. They reveal the hidden connections between ourselves and others, they bring us all out in the open, and they give us something to talk to each other about. Think about it: how many bells are hiding out there that you don’t know about? As soon as they started ringing, I know you would feel something about the city around us that you’d never felt before. You would stand on our rooftop and see your surroundings in a new way. Features of the landscape which had always been meaningless to you might now matter in some small way.

These bells are my flight of fancy. What is yours? What else remains undone, for no good reason, at an unexpected scale? What else could we do if someone brought us together and inspired us to do it?

I love you so much,

Dad

SECOND LETTER

Dear Sophie and Nora,

I love telling you things because I don’t have to hide how strongly I feel about them when I talk with you. When adults speak to one another, we go to great lengths to convince ourselves that we feel things less strongly than we actually do. But I know that when you experience a feeling—joy, sadness, frustration, pain, surprise—you experience it so very intensely. It’s the same way for me. Life is a strong flavor: sometimes it’s just too much and sometimes it overwhelms me.

Some people who feel the world very strongly make the choice to share this feeling with others by creating things like poems or paintings or songs or sculptures. Sometimes, this type of person calls themself an artist and sometimes other people call them an artist as well. I believe that it’s a very special kind of work because only a few people are willing to organize their life around feeling things and then giving that feeling material form for the benefit of others.

All children are like artists in the sense that they experience the world so strongly that it sometimes overwhelms them. This is part of the special connection that exists between artists and children. This doesn’t mean that artists make good parents—often, they’re very poor parents because they are so consumed with their own experience of the world that it becomes difficult for them to prioritize other people. But they have something in common with children, they share a sensibility with them, and they are connected with them even if it’s not always in the correct parental way.

I remember one afternoon when you, Sophie, were six, and you, Nora, were a bit less than three. Sophie learned about Taylor Swift, whom I had never heard, at summer camp and asked me to play something from her album 1989 (Taylor’s Version was not yet available). The three of us listened to the whole record at top volume before I cooked you both dinner and we all loved it. I did something I rarely do when I am with other adults because I am self-conscious and nervous when it comes to my physical self: we danced in our living room and I danced with you and I danced recklessly and joyfully and without any reservation or fear.

While I danced around near the table, you both ran as fast as you could from one end of the room to the other, back and forth, again and again. This was how it made sense to you to express your physical experience of the music. As you ran and I bounced and we all laughed, I knew that there was nothing I could do that would make you think I was outrageous or strange or flamboyant or inelegant or pitiable. Your love for me at that time was complete and unconditional and disconnected from whether I was attractive or dignified or noble. To you, none of my gestures meant anything or signified anything about me. You understood them in exactly the same way I did, as a spontaneous physical expression of togetherness and the experience of joyful music.

I am someone who is always painfully aware of how others perceive me, and who controls very carefully how I present myself to the world. But with you and only you, that’s not the case. For this reason, our relationship is completely different than my relationship with anyone else.

Being a parent is not something that came naturally to me. But, in so many ways, I am able to be myself with you in ways that I cannot with anyone else. When I am with you, I can experience and respond to life with all of the joy and exuberance and sincerity and earnestness that makes me who I am inside, but which, in my adult life, I channel into my music rather than into my physical self.

I love you so much,

Dad

THIRD LETTER

Dear Sophie and Nora,

Please tell the truth. Every day, life will present you with opportunities to report on reality: by telling someone what you or someone else did, are doing, or will do; by telling yourself what you or someone else did or might do. In most cases, you will have some degree of editorial freedom to shape these narratives in ways which mask your failures and amplify your successes. I urge you to resist the temptation to do so.

The cognitive burden of each editorial adjustment will compound across the days and months and years. Instead of referencing the past as you experienced it—which is hard enough to do—you must access a kind of double image that encompasses both the past as you experienced it and the past as you rewrote it. These images intertwine and become indistinguishable from one another, at least to you. But life often holds you responsible for the image that is real and not for the image you have fashioned. Maintaining both images is exhausting and it does not ultimately serve you to do so.

At first, this suggestion will sound banal. You will tell me that you tell the truth all or most of the time. You will tell me that only a terrible person would go about telling lies all the time. But once you apply this filter to the voice that guides your inner world, you will find that it is continually magnifying, minimizing, distorting, and redefining the world around you. It reimagines the past and refuses to fully acknowledge the present. And you, when you describe the world that is or has been or might be, will replicate these fictions and they will multiply and expand and they will overwhelm you.

One day when I was perhaps 38 years old, I made the decision to always tell the truth, even when doing so would make me seem foolish or selfish or incompetent or negligent. Happily, I do not carry with me any of what you would call significant untruths. But once I began to listen, I noticed that I lied all the time in an attempt to hide my frequent minor failings. Rather than acknowledging that I’d ignored an email, I would claim that it had gone to my junk folder. Rather than acknowledging that I had left the house late, I would claim to have been stuck in traffic. Rather than admitting that I had given away an old toy that you sought out after months or years of inattention, I would claim not to have seen it (all parents do this, I’m sorry to report).

When I decided to stop doing this, several things changed. Acknowledging my constant small failures made me feel more connected to other people, all of whom are also failing in small ways all the time. It lessened the impact of any given lapse. And it simplified the daily act of interacting with people.

You will be so much lighter if you commit to telling the truth all the time, no matter what, and without compromise. When you abandon the double image and just say what is or what was, a thousand tiny decisions disappear. The reality of your imperfection is never as dire as you think it will be. The consequence of human error is usually small and fleeting. People move on.

Like the other letters, my concern here is not that you do this for the benefit of others or in fealty to an abstract moral system. I want you to tell the truth because doing so will make your life so much simpler, easier, and more free.

I love you so much,

Dad

FOURTH LETTER

Dear Sophie and Nora,

This is uncomfortable to admit, but before you were born, I was afraid that I would not love you. I wasn’t fond of small children and it was impossible to imagine how the fact of your being my small children would overcome this general aversion. The night before Sophie was born, I walked to a big field near our house and lay down on the wet grass and stared up at the sky and confronted my inability to feel what I knew I was supposed to feel. I was terrified.

When you were born, I wept and I told you that I would love you with every fiber of my being from that day until my last day. When I told you this, I understood for the first time what it meant to really tell the truth. Here is what I mean. Hidden in most oaths and affirmations is a subtle subjunctive: To the best of my knowledge, I will never let you down. As far as I can tell, I will love no other but you. It seems to me as though my highest calling is to create music. Each of these statements are true as far as I can tell. But at the same time I can never really know. But the love I felt for you on that first day was different by kind, and not just by degree. 

I will always love you. This is not because I am a good father, or because I am a good person (I often fear that I am neither). It is not a result of any hard work on my part, or any wisdom, or because of any of the choices that I have made. I do not love you because I am supposed to or because anyone else expects me to. I do not love you because I expect to gain something in return. I never made a conscious choice to love you. Nor, I’m sorry to report, do I love you because of anything intrinsic to you or your individual qualities (although you are both exceptional people and highly deserving of love on the basis of your merits alone).

I love you because I am your father and because you are my daughters. This kind of love is not earned and it is not deserved, it is not chosen or willed, it cannot be revoked, and it doesn’t reflect anything that either you or I have done. It is like gravity: it does not have a moral dimension and it is not something we can opt out of. It is simply a basic element of our shared reality. You may take it for granted, you may undervalue it, you may ignore it, you may abuse it, and you may wish it weren’t so, but, like the curvature of space that draws us all downward into the earth and draws the earth into the sun and draws the sun into the great mystery and so on and so on, the fact that I love you and will always love you is something that defines the world in which we all will live forever.

In this respect, it is different from every other kind of love, each of which involve some kind of choice and, therefore, are at least a tiny bit fragile. In some religious traditions, this kind of love is called grace. It is described as the way a divine presence loves us all: we did not earn this love and we do not deserve it, but we have it nonetheless. I have no way of verifying whether a divine presence loves me or you or anyone else, but this concept of grace is a useful way of understanding the way a parent loves their children. I tried to encapsulate this feeling in a song about a rabbit that I wrote for you before either of you were born. One of its lines reads, “go ahead my darling, take my love for granted.” This is what I meant.

And so, through the fact of your existence you have both taught me about the meaning of truth itself. And this truth revealed itself to me not as a result of introspection, but in spite of it. It was true whether I wanted it to be or not. It was truer for its inevitability, its artlessness, and its lack of will. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want it not to be true. It simply was.

I love you so much,

Dad

FIFTH LETTER

To my darling girls:

In the long course of your life, people will do many surprising and disappointing things. At the individual, group, and societal levels, they will behave in ways that don’t make sense to you or that seem wrongheaded or misguided or selfish or mean. At times, people will hurt you. Human beings have treated one another and their environments poorly for many thousands of years and will continue to do so for many years to come.

At the same time, though, I want you to know that our world is the most extraordinarily bright and beautiful place. People are capable of such goodness and kindness and decency. They are capable of sacrifice and wisdom. They are capable of exuberance and moderation and discretion. They support each other. They cultivate. They observe. They listen.

Much can cause us to lose faith in the basic goodness of all things. But I do not want you to do so. I want you to know that the world is good and that you are good and that the people around you can be good, too. I want this for you because there is no compelling reason to want otherwise:

Being cautious may save you from failure, but only a little bit. Failure is inevitable. Being fearful may save you from harm, but only a little bit. Harm comes to us all from time to time. Being skeptical may save you from trickery, but only a little bit. In the end, we are all foolish and we all know so little. Being vengeful may save you from dishonor, but only a little bit. The balance of justice is always off-center and it is always in motion. Being aggressive may save you from weakness, but only a little bit. We are all weak in so many ways. Being disengaged may save you from appearing desperate, but only a little bit. Our desires will always be revealed.

There will always be good reasons to disconnect from the world or to adopt a defensive relationship to it or to give up on it. But even if these reasons are sound—which they often are—it will not serve you in any meaningful way to do so. Instead, you must approach the world as if it were the one it should be. Only by doing this will you contribute to making it so. Only by doing this will it feel so to you. This is a cliché, but many things are cliché and not all of them are equally relevant at all times. This cliché is important right now, as I write these letters to you, in the winter of 2024 going into 2025.

Only by doing this will you preserve that incredible reservoir of goodness and decency that I now see in you every day and which is the great and singular gift of both the very young and the very wise.

I love you so much,

Dad

5 November 2024, late morning