The Street is a set of meditations on the fourteen stations of the cross scored for solo harp. Each movement can, in some performances, be paired with plainchant, chosen to augment and in some cases provide counterpoint to the traditional narrative of Good Friday. The spark for each movement is original texts by Alice Goodman — either read aloud or read in silence — which are simultaneously specific, evocative, mysterious, and poetic. Often, a single line will provide the starting-point for the music; when Jesus is condemned to death (Station I), Goodman describes the crowd shouting "crucify him": “the pitch dropping as it passes where you stand.” The harp, in turn, plays a modern version of the same, a kind of digital-delay effect, where the pitch creeps down the scale. This two-note descending motif becomes the governing gesture of the piece.
“Remember the carpenter’s work” (II) suggests an honest, folksy labor, work done with the hands; Mary, come to Jerusalem “to be seen in that first look between mother and child,” hears the echo of a rocking-song from three decades before (IV). Veronica, looking at her sudarium (VI), notices that “He is printed in molecules of blood and sweat,” and hears a chord, diffused and delicate, as if seen under a microscope. A narrator — all of us, perhaps — causes Jesus’s second fall: “My fault. I put out my foot and tripped him. What can I say?” and the harp responds with a bullying, rhythmically intense unbroken set of shifting, stumbling gestures (VII).
Other stations of the cross take their musical cues from the attendant plainchant, most explicitly heard in station VIII, when Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem and we hear the chant Filiæ Jerusalem played by bell-like harp harmonics. Although Goodman’s texts are never themselves sung, they often suggest lyrical writing which itself could be sung: the line “However low I fall, let me not fall far from you” (IX) engenders a little tune which haunts the final five movements.
The “rich, ferrous smell of blood” encourages the harp to play the instrument with a guitar pick: a small little hand-tool, brittle and sharp. After Jesus’s death (XII), the music becomes simpler, almost businesslike; Goodman avoids the eclipses, rending of the veil of the temple and earthquakes, and asks: “Isn’t it enough that he died?” As Joseph, Nicodemus, and Peter take down the body from the cross, and prepare the burial ritual, the music becomes simpler still, built on a simple drone on middle C: it’s going through the motions, but somehow transformed into something uneasy. Goodman ends her meditations with the mourner’s kaddish (XIV), performed just before the appearance of the first star in the sky (per Jewish law), and the harp, having played a kind of transformed cradle-song, fast forwards an hour, and ends with a vision of the night sky.
NICO MUHLY (né en 1981) est un compositeur américain et collaborateur recherché dont les influences vont du minimalisme américain à la tradition chorale anglicane. Récipiendaire de commandes du Metropolitan Opera, du Carnegie Hall, de la cathédrale Saint-Paul et d'autres, il a écrit plus de 80 œuvres pour la scène, dont l'opéra Marnie (2017), créé à l'English National Opera et mis en scène. par le Metropolitan Opera à l'automne 2018.
Muhly collabore fréquemment avec le chorégraphe Benjamin Millepied et, en tant qu'arrangeur, s'est associé à Sufjan Stevens, Antony and the Johnsons et d'autres. Son travail pour la scène et le cinéma comprend la musique de la reprise à Broadway de The Glass Menagerie et des musiques de films, dont The Reader, lauréat d'un Oscar. Né dans le Vermont, Muhly a étudié la composition à la Juilliard School avant de travailler comme éditeur et chef d'orchestre pour Philip Glass. Il fait partie du label d'artistes Bedroom Community, qui a sorti ses deux premiers albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) et Mothertongue (2008). Il vit à New York.
ALICE GOODMAN (née en 1958) est une poète et librettiste américaine. Elle a fait ses études à l'Université Harvard et au Girton College de Cambridge, où elle a étudié la littérature anglaise et américaine. Elle a obtenu sa maîtrise en théologie de la Boston University School of Theology. Elle est connue pour avoir écrit les livrets de deux opéras du compositeur américain John Adams, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer.
Elle est maintenant prêtre anglicane et travaille en Angleterre.