The three-part cycle sew me into a shroud of leaves is the result of a fifteen-year undertaking, the writing spanning the period 2001-2016. In performance, the work lasts approximately fourteen hours (c. 10 hours of written music, and c. 4 hours of designated intermissions).
I was already thirty years old when I commenced the piece, and though I had been composing for quite some time by that point, I felt I was only beginning to gain a clear(er) sense of where I wanted to direct my time and energies. While some of my very earliest pieces were quite expansive in duration, I had begun to move away from these works of larger dimensions. But by 2001, I was determined to return to my interests in and for longer forms. A major catalyst for this particular cycle was the poetry of Christopher Middleton (1926-2015). His work and our friendship made a deep impression on me, and marked a turning point. I found in his best poetry a kind of impact, concision, coloration, and internal momentum which attracted me. Middleton was capable of creating unique, at times brutal, landscapes of largely unsentimental utterances which resisted ornament and moved inexorably through time.
I began the first part of sew me into a shroud of leaves in the days just after September 11, 2001. There was something about the exposure to Middleton’s poetry in juxtaposition with this chaotic period that led me to at least in part reevaluate my approach to music. In particular, I wanted to get at a kind of essence that I felt in Middleton’s words, an essence which felt particularly germane to the moment. Issues relating to violence both externally and, later, internally (illness), would never be far from my work moving forward, even if momentarily paused.
These themes would become an atmospheric, and at times structural, presence; a kind of musical grappling with their respective parallels and divergences. For much of the past fifteen years, during which I lost a very close friend to cancer and recovered from my own bout with the disease, physical illness and its consequences have been a focus. These experiences particularly informed the second and third parts of sew me into a shroud of leaves.
Not long after meeting Middleton, various musical materials emerged from my engagement with his poems or, more specifically, fragments from his poetry (only rarely complete poems). I knew from the outset that some of these musical thoughts, which often took the form of a particular gesture, sonority or harmonic interaction, would appear across the totality of the work, sometimes with little alteration, sometimes radically altered to the point of complete distortion, and most oftentimes appearing with subtle variants.
The complete architecture of the trilogy came gradually, though the internal design of each panel unfurled rather quickly. There are 153 total movements/sections in all: 50 comprising The Vanishing Pavilions, 41 for Last Autumn, and 62 for one day may become menace. The process moving forward was guided by a sense of potential in the material both sonic and text-based.
Depending on how the listener approaches them, the associated texts by Christopher Middleton, W.G. Sebald, and Marius Kociejowski either form a framework for the music or a parallel framework, or perhaps something of both. The music does not attempt to render these specific words in sound, rather, the writing of the music was buoyed by the particular energy one can feel when one senses connection - real or imagined - in another art form. I find this phenomenon more readily in non-musical frameworks of any kind, but in the case of this cycle the texts of these three writers/poets were central.
The text fragments of Middleton, Sebald, and Kociejowski share qualities with the work of yet another poet, Fawzi Karim (1945-2019). Karim and I worked together on a different project many years after I began sew me into a shroud of leaves. Regarding his own work, Karim noted: “I have become very close to the idea of the simple sentence, one in which there is no exaggerated feeling or idea or belief. It is better to leave things just as they are. Once you add these other things you misjudge, you become unjust.” I realize this sentiment, and any relationship it might have to sew me into a shroud of leaves may sound strange; that it may seem at odds with such a work. However, I do not see any inherent conflict with detail, scale, and the attempt to achieve the “simple sentence.” The question for me comes down to an essence, and/or the essentialness of an idea, what it requires to speak and whether one is able to capture and carry through the idea; in this case through music.
—Michael HerschEssay based in part on a 2021 interview with Christopher Fox