Scott Ordway

North Woods (2014)

SSAA vocal ensemble / 14’

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.

We all know the most about the physical and social worlds that are closest to our own. As curiosity or compassion shifts our attention further afield, we know progressively less, and, at some point, we arrive at a place where knowledge fades away and is replaced by pure imagination.

This boundary between knowing and unknowing is where many of our best and some of our worst qualities emerge. It is where hatred, prejudice, and fear often originate. But it is also the birthplace of religious imagination, artistic creation, and social progress. In this place, standing at the distant edge of what we know and looking out at the vast expanse of what we do not, we are able to imagine—and sometimes create—a world beyond our own that is better, or more beautiful, or simply different than the one we already have.

Late in the first century, the historian Tacitus (56–120 CE) wrote two histories—Agricola and Germania (both ca. 98 CE)—describing the landscape and culture at the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. He never traveled there himself, instead building his narrative from a wide range of fragmented sources. Unsurprisingly, much of what he wrote was wrong. But where his understanding of the world ended, the magnificence of his imagination began to reveal itself and he gave us an endless ocean, a forest at the edge of creation, and shadows cast upward by the level edge of the earth itself.

His error, and the softly glowing forest world he imagined, are the starting point for North Woods (2014), a work for eight-part treble choir in three movements followed by a short appendix. For me, this imaginative error is not a flaw but a model: mystery and uncertainty can generate new structures of thought, and of sound.

II.

Reading Tacitus, I was drawn to the passages most saturated with his wonder at the strangeness of the imagined idea of the north. They brought to mind Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary The Idea of North, another work based on minimal first-hand experience but which addresses an abstract “north” as a place of strangeness and imagination. Tacitus’ descriptions of the landscape are wide-eyed and radiant, as if he is telling us something he himself can’t quite believe: the nights are not dark, the ocean is endless, and shadows don’t behave as they do in the real world.

Most importantly for me is his observation that “they do not imprison their gods within walls”, an allusion to the pre-Christian forest paganism which then organized life in Northern Europe and which, in an oddly circular turn, resembles how I grew up in Northern California. If there were a higher power anywhere to be found in 1990s Santa Cruz, she would probably have been found in the shadowy mountains and canyons of the coastal redwood forest.

This intensive relationship to forests continues to guide me personally, and inspires much of my creative work. I do not romanticize them as picturesque landscapes, and I do not turn to them as a source of national pride—we have done nothing to deserve these trees. Instead, I relate to forests in the same way as Tacitus’ half-real Germans: they are where I go to connect with the world on a deep and irrational level, to make important decisions, and to know who I am. They are where I go to recover myself. This is the sense of the forest that informs my work.

III.

Whether reading Tacitus or walking among California redwoods, I experience forests as architectural spaces rather than stories. Instead of narrative, I experience the quality of the light, the texture of the air, and the soft instability of the soil.

In my collaboration with the extraordinary singers of the Lorelei Ensemble, I have sought to create music that reflects this kind of space by drawing on the sonic qualities I value most: light, sonority, clarity, texture, and restraint. I wanted to make a quiet, shared, and sacred acoustic environment that is grounded in careful attention to the resonance and quality of sound itself. Through their artistry, Lorelei has made my imagined space into something real.

The structure of the work is designed to showcase the power, precision, and emotional intensity of treble voices—qualities often lacking in repertoire for soprano and alto choirs. This is a place that only an ensemble like Lorelei—and the many ambitious young singers they now inspire—can go.

In drawing on these qualities, North Woods belongs to a lineage of modern vocal music that is concerned with the construction of sonic environments—spacious architectures of measured resonance in service of ecological and spiritual themes. In the end, what I wanted to make and share was a generous and detailed acoustic space like the forests in my own life, a place where nothing moves but everything is radiant.

—Scott Ordway
August 2025

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.)