Premiered April 7th, 2017 by members of the Pepperdine Chamber Choir, conducted by Jens Ibsen

Performed December 9th, 2020 by the NEC Chamber Singers, conducted by Erica J. Washburn

I come to my beloved as the dew upon the flowers.

Welcome, my precious dove. You have flown so keenly over the earth that your feathers reach to heaven.

Mechthild von Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead

Translation by Frank Tobin

I have been continuously inspired by the works of female medieval mystics. While most people only know Hildegard von Bingen, Mechthild von Magdeburg was a remarkably gifted writer of ecstatic poetry and prose in her own right, and was the first medieval mystic to write in the vernacular German. This particular excerpt I have set hails from her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead. It is full of everything from discourse on proper Christian worship, to prosaic conversations between the author and God, and lines of poetic verse. As in other mystic poetic traditions, like that of the Sufis, there is always a sense of duality to these texts. Taken out of context, they can be interpreted as ecstatic love poetry to a distant lover, but upon closer inspection one sees the texts’ deeply spiritual nature. That said, some excerpts could even be read as highly erotic, which is not uncharacteristic for the genre. In honor of her legacy, I chose to set the text in its oldest surviving German translation; it is as close to the original Old High German as possible.

I wanted the piece to be full of constant movement, reflecting the excited nature of the text. Often the singers are behaving more instrumentally than vocally, particularly during the fast sextuplet figures in the middle section. The piece is a spiritual journey, starting from a chant-like invocation, exploding into glory upon god answering his beloved, and then an ascension into heaven when the beloved's spirit takes wing out of sheer awe at God's immanence. The aleatoric sections emphasize the frenetic spiritual energy of the devotee throughout, and should always be undercut with intensity. All in all, there should be a sense of divine ritual permeating this piece.