The Anchoress: Booklet

DAVID SERKIN LUDWIG

The ANCHORESS Poetry by Katie Ford Hyunah Yu, soprano Mimi Stillman, flute PRISM Quartet Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

The Anchoress (2018) for soprano voice, saxophone quartet, and renaissance wind ensemble Music by David Serkin Ludwig (b. 1974) Poetry by Katie Ford (b. 1975)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

What Is My Life? 3:53 Once a Woman Went Down the Hill 3:35 What Are We to Make of Visions Lit? 4:22 This Is the Four Burns of the Soul 4:22 One Night in Particular 4:26 A Woman of the Village 1:50 Be Not Assured 2:24 When I Woke Up Sighing 5:20

Three Anchoress Songs (2018) for flute/piccolo and tenor saxophone

by David Serkin Ludwig

9 Virelai 2:08 10 Ballade 2:25 11 Rondeau 3:41

The Anchoress Hyunah Yu soprano PRISM Quartet Ali Wright (guest artist) soprano saxophone Zachary Shemon alto saxophone Matthew Levy tenor saxophone Taimur Sullivan baritone saxophone Piffaro, The Renaissance Band Priscilla Herreid recorder, dulcian, shawm, krumhorn Greg Ingles recorder, sackbut, krumhorn Joan Kimball recorder, dulcian, shawm, krumhorn Erik Schmalz recorder, sackbut, krumhorn Robert Wiemken recorder, dulcian, krumhorn, percussion Arash Noori (guest artist) theorbo, lute

Three Anchoress Songs Mimi Stillman flute, piccolo Matthew Levy tenor saxophone

The Anchoress

Dedication This album is dedicated to the memory of Walter Spink (1928–2019), and to those lost to Covid-19.

Recording Venue / Dates Recorded at the Curtis Institute of Music, Gould Rehearsal Hall in Philadelphia, PA. The Anchoress was recorded on October 19, 2018 and July 3, 2019. Three Anchoress Songs was recorded on October 10, 2019.

Acknowledgements The Anchoress was commissioned with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Three Anchoress Songs was commissioned by the Awea Duo. This recording was made possible with generous support from The Presser Foundation, the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Photo by ScottFriedlander

The medieval anchoress cuts a paradoxical figure: Buried alive, she is sought out for her wisdom. Encased in perpetual darkness, she is considered clairvoyant.

Dead to the world, she becomes a pillar of her community.

During the Early and High Middle Ages, hundreds of women volunteered for a life of extreme deprivation as anchoresses, mystics bricked up in cells attached to churches.

In each anchorhold, a tiny window, known as a “squint,” opened onto the sanctuary so that the anchoress could take part in the Eucharist.

Another opened onto the outside world. Villagers and sometimes even senior clerics would come to that window to consult her on spiritual questions. There were male anchorites, too, but at the height

of the practice women outnumbered them four to one.

Compared to the other choices – wife, nun, servant, prostitute – the life of a recluse demanded acute sacrifice, but promised in return a level of safety few commonborn women enjoyed. The anchorhold protected her from sexual assault, pestilence, and the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth.

And it offered respect, and a certain autonomy.

Some anchoresses wielded considerable influence as is evident from the number of texts – written by men – that warned against excessive pride, sociability, or independence of thought. The perfect anchorite life, wrote one author, was lived “in silence, in secret, in darkness.”

For the poet Katie Ford, these contradictions become a point of entry into the inner life of an

Photo by Pete Checchia

The Living Grave, Illuminated

anchoress who is by turns contemplative and bitter, mystical and shrewd. We listen in on conversations she has at her window, follow her mind as it roams through a landscape of memory, and experience with her pangs of terror, doubt and religious ecstasy. In certain places, Ford inserts artful redactions, like passages in a manuscript rendered illegible by censorship or time.

In David Serkin Ludwig’s setting, the words of Ford’s Anchoress take flight in a flock of voices – all performed by a single soprano who employs a spectrum of vocal techniques, from whispers and the sing-speak style called Sprechstimme to lyrical outpourings and wordless vocalise. Ludwig also gives his Anchoress a doppelgänger in the shape of a solo recorder. Sometimes it hovers about the female voice, or cuts in like a shard of sunlight strafing the cell. On occasion, the recorder seems to take flight – the embodiment of a soul that cannot be confined.

The recorder is part of an ensemble of Renaissanceperiod instruments that adds idiomatic color to Ludwig’s score. They share space, incongruously, with a quartet of saxophones who take on a variety of guises. When quoting the 14th-century composer Machaut, the saxophones blend together into a soft incense haze. In combination with the recorders, shawms and sackbuts they can create unruly sonorities of gnomish exuberance, like the medieval science fiction of Hieronymus Bosch.

In fact, the work is structured in painterly vignettes more than in movements, each one bathed in a particular light and mood. In the opening scene we hear the instrumentalists intone the Requiem over stern chords repeated as in a processional. The dark funerary music marks the death of the Anchoress’s earthly life and her entrance into the living grave of her cell.

Subsequent scenes evoke a beehive of questions, a nightmarish excursion through dangerous woods; the bubble and murmur of secular life on the other side of thick walls.

Where the Anchoress’s words are obliterated in Ford’s poem, the saxophones create a violent scribble of noise, an eruption of sonic vandalism, part growl, part metal. In the fifth movement, the composer writes in “twelve seconds of chaos,” a carefully choreographed scramble of frantic strumming, muffled shouts and asynchronous flurries of saxophone scales.

Against such outbursts, prayerful passages like the one that concludes the work unfold with startling radiance. While Ludwig’s harmonies won’t brook any glib resolution, they suggest a female form of embodied spirituality that, even bereft of illusions, finds illumination.

“Three Anchoress Songs” for flute and tenor saxophone was written during the gestation period of “The Anchoress.”

Here, too, are echoes of Machaut and sound painting evoking extremes of light and darkness, movement and bricked-in stasis. The second song features a flutter of saxophone runs in which the sound pales until only the clip-clap of the instrument’s keys are audible, like the frantic movements of a bird trapped in a snug room. The final song, for piccolo and saxophone, expands in a mode of dreamy lyricism, with the piccolo tracing gleaming arabesques in space shadowed by the saxophone. It ends with the two performers quietly singing Machaut’s rondeau “Doulz viaire gracious.” After the unconfined wordless ruminations by the two instruments, the unexpected appearance of human language feels like an intrusion on a deeply intimate communion with the divine.

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

Photo by Pete Checchia

The Anchoress: Translations

Lower Europe, 14th Century

I. What is my life – what composes it. I had promised my body to a man. But in front of the man my soul slid away as the moon fails its own appearing by morning, almost. In face of such a morning, I left one stone-bright burial for another, my other, this cell so dark all of me might make its light. What my life is, I answered this. And then I enclosed it.

fills you with new thinkings on our Lord, yet they bear down against the teachings of […]. Not like an axe they bear down, understand, you say, but like a comb, and like a comb brought through your hair by another until you sleep, you feel tended […] What I am going to say to you now I may not have a mouth to say again, since this is a time of burnings. There is nothing we […] completely. Not […] . Not teachings. Not the desert […], not the fevered disciple. We are humans of a living separation.

What, then, will you make of her feverish ongoings? What will you make.

II. Once, a woman walked down the hill towards the anchorhold, her whole body barnacled with what she could not say. Is it more body? she asked through the little window. She had heard of the church’s garden of healing almond, aloe, anise, cornsilk. She said she could not bear the thought that this earthly body might rise again. I cannot believe it occurred for our Lord, she said. I told her not to […] It was the age of great mortality. She had walked from the village with what looked like burrs on the undersides of her feet. I want to say […] not at all concerning the flesh, and witness to this is the words of James the brother, the contradictions of […] this manifold silence. Yet I cannot, so she walks away, growing small and ever-smaller through my window. And unhealed.

III. What, you ask, are we to make of visions lit during fever, thrush, or pox. I have thought of this ever since your letter arrived last season, and have considered it while imagining I walk the orchard with a knife to the apricot frost, all the while kneeling at the rail. I have thought in sleep, thought in illness. You say one of your sisters receives the words of our Lord only when her body is tossed with sweats and confusion.

You say she speaks with the authority of one stricken by truth, yet her eyes have the aura of pale smoke or the gray owl. The content of her visions gives you hope, you say, and

IV. This is the four burns of the soul: Whether something outside of us can reach in and affect change, aside or beside, beside or thinly away, thinly and unbearably so – God: this is the whether or whether not we cannot know. Whether to believe there is an unbearable distance or to imagine no distance, thereby feeling a proximity lifting oneself into that which is both imagined and is, or is imagined and is not, or not imagined and is, or not imagined and is not. Those are the choices, four. So that is the pain, that choosing is the only region for us. Here where the fires so constantly alternate their burns.

V. One night in particular I dreamt I stole from the isolate into the forest. In a vision I’d seen a tent of sticks and linden in which burned an amber light that was our Lord’s voice saying there was more I wished to say before […] and correction must […] . I took the danger at its word, setting into the woods filled with blister, bandit fire […] once an arrow. So many shed by war and wasting then. First my vow, then a departure, which made of me […] the way of God to go against Him just how a silversmith takes a piece of hollowware, fills it with

The Anchoress: Translations

Lower Europe, 14th Century

hot metal, leaves behind swage blocks and hammer, and pours silver over a sapling found dead one day past, simply to preserve a beauty in the horror-woods. And so I left the cell for the linden of my vision, but it was not there as it had appeared to me – all I felt was peril and very far from the promises and […] no interspersing God. Then, not from the linden but from the terror, I heard the Lord depart these words: […] Not for, but because. I was tortured by […] I meant to […] And that was all. An unlocking silence fell over the trees and I embarked to my cell in which I wrote swiftly this letter to you, who remain […] your own terror.

perceiving what in sleep only strengthened its contention, though I mistook night as healer, sleep as erasure, vespers as lumbering dissolution towards matins, matins a leaf made violet since it hangs askance grapes in full sun, since I mistook the leaf for myself, correlating and equating, the determined danger given water and meat, when the mistake pulled down and I woke not arisen but sighing, sighing so the ornaments knew I was nothing to hang upon, no shuttle to loom by, when I could not make a word and the given words of each book failed me into sighing, it was then I could to the Lord say yes.

VI. A woman of the village wrote to ask if I would visit her stone cottage. How, she wrote, can I advise her soul when I have not seen the wooden crates her children sleep in, or the coarse flour she makes last a week, or how vermin eat her cellar stores. Her request a theology entire. Yet I could make no visit.

VII. If one comes to you saying God said or God speaks to me in secret, tread upon such words as a moth treads possible prey – an investigating carnivore who will devour what, for him to live, must be killed. Does God speak now, to us of the earth? I beg this into my own vertebrae. I whisper to my brothers and sisters who say God has instructed them to take up hatchet in battle and hand to infant: be not assured.

VIII. When I woke up sighing, perceiving myself in the freeze, perceiving my body in the terrifying orchard, sighing and contending, contending and appearing, disappearing into sighing, sighing of ornament and cargo, pulling down what was broken from twilight and broken from dawn,

Biographies David Serkin Ludwig’s first musical memory was singing Beatles songs with his sister. His second was hearing his grandfather perform at Carnegie Hall, foreshadowing a diverse career collaborating with many of today’s leading musicians, filmmakers, and writers. His choral work “The New Colossus,” opened the private prayer service for President Obama’s second inauguration. The next year NPR Music named him in the world’s “Top 100 Composers Under Forty.” He holds positions and residencies with nearly two dozen orchestras and music festivals in the US and abroad.

Mr. Ludwig has received commissions and notable performances from many of the most recognized artists and ensembles of our time, including the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and National Symphony orchestras, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as Jonathan Biss, Jeremy Denk, Jennifer Koh, Jaime Laredo, David Shifrin, eighth blackbird, the Dover and Borromeo quartets, and PRISM Quartet.

Mr. Ludwig received the prestigious 2018 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship, as well as the First Music Award, and is a two-time recipient of the Independence Foundation Fellowship, a Theodore Presser Foundation Career Grant, and awards from New Music USA, the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Detroit Chamber Winds, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Ludwig is the Gie and Lisa Liem Artistic Advisor and Chair of Composition at The Curtis Institute of Music, and is director of The Curtis contemporary music Ensemble 20/21.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, acclaimed violinist Bella Hristova, and their four beloved cats, Schmoopy, Uni, Frankie, and Lili.

Photo by Bella Hristova

davidludwigmusic.com

Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems, most recently, If You Have to Go (Graywolf Press). Her third, Blood Lyrics, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Her second, Colosseum, was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature.

In addition to “The Anchoress,” Ms. Ford’s work has been commissioned by the Poetry Society of America and the Brooklyn Art and Song Society. She holds degrees in theology from Harvard University and in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and lives in South Pasadena with her daughter. fordkatie.com

Photo by Helge Brekke

Hyunah Yu

Applauded for her “absolutely captivating voice with exceptional style and effort­less lyrical grace” (Washington Post), soprano Hyunah Yu has garnered acclaim for her versatility in opera roles, her work in chamber music, her collaborations with contemporary com­posers, and her recordings and broadcast performances. Known particularly for her performances of the music of J.S. Bach, Ms. Yu has appeared regularly with esteemed conductors, festivals, and orchestras throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. An avid chamber musician and recitalist, Ms. Yu has enjoyed en­gagements with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Baltimore’s Shriver Hall Concert Series, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Vancouver Recital Society, The Phillips Collection, Musicians from Marlboro, and many others. A highlight of Ms. Yu’s opera career was singing the title role in Peter Sellars’ production of Mozart’s Zaide in a joint production of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, the Barbican Centre in London, and the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna. She recorded Bach/Mozart Arias on EMI’s Debut Series to rave reviews, and has been broadcast in solo recitals by BBC Voices. Ms. Yu was a prizewinner at the Walter Naumburg International Competition and a finalist in both the Dutch International Vocal and Concert Artist Guild International competitions. She is the recipient of the coveted BorlettiBuitoni Trust Award, for which she was nominated by pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Ms. Yu also holds a degree in molecular biology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Photo by Pete Checchia

Mimi Stillman

Flutist Mimi Stillman is an internationally acclaimed solo, chamber, and recording artist hailed by The New York Times as “not only a consummate and charismatic performer, but also a scholar. Her programs tend to activate ear, heart, and brain.” She has performed as a soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Bach Collegium Stuttgart, Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Yucatán, and at venues including Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, La Jolla Chamber Music Society, and Verbier Festival.

Ms. Stillman is founding artistic director of the popular Dolce Suono Ensemble (DSE), performing Baroque to new music with 54 world premieres in 15 seasons. She is an author on music and history, a media and radio host, and is highly regarded for expanding the repertoire through her commissions and arrangements. Her awards and prizes include the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the Bärenreiter Prize for Historical Performance for Winds, and seven National Endowment for the Arts grants. A Spanish speaker, she won a Knight Foundation grant for DSE’s Música en tus Manos project to introduce chamber music to Philadelphia’s Latino communities.

Ms. Stillman is a Yamaha Performing Artist and Clinician.

She has taught masterclasses and coached chamber music at institutions including the universities of Texas, California, Florida, Virginia, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina, the Eastman School of Music, and the National Flute Association. She holds a BM from the Curtis Institute of Music and an MA in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She is artist-in-residence on faculty at Temple University and Curtis Summerfest. mimistillman.com Photo by Vanessa Briceño

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band

“Widely regarded as North America’s masters of music for Renaissance wind band” (St. Paul Pioneer Press), Piffaro delights audiences with highly polished recreations of the rustic music of the peasantry and the elegant sounds of the official wind bands of the late Me­dieval and Renaissance periods. Its ever-expanding instrumentarium includes shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, recorders, krumhorns, bagpipes, lutes, guitars, harps, and a variety of percussion – all careful reconstructions of instruments from the period. Under the direction of Artistic Directors Joan Kimball and Bob Wiemken, the world renowned pied-pipers of Early Music present an annual concert series in the Philadelphia region; tour throughout the US, Europe, Canada and South America; and appear as performers and instructors at major Early Music festivals. Recordings are a significant part of the ensemble’s work, with 19 CDs released since 1992, including four on the prestigious label Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv Produktion. Active in the field of education, Piffaro has been honored twice for its work by Early Music America, receiving the “Early Music Brings History Alive” award in 2003 and the Laurette Goldberg “Lifetime Achievement Award in Early Music Outreach” in 2011. In June 2015, the American Recorder Society honored Piffaro with its Distinguished Achieve­ment Award. piffaro.org

Photo by Kathryn E. Raines, PLATE3

Intriguing programs of great beauty and breadth have distinguished the PRISM Quartet as one of America’s foremost chamber ensembles. “A bold ensemble that set the standard for contemporary-classical saxophone quartets” (The New York Times), PRISM has been presented by Carnegie Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and throughout Latin America, China, and Russia under the auspices of USIA and USArtists International. PRISM has also appeared as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, and conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute and the Oberlin Conservatory. Two-time recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, PRISM has commissioned nearly 300 works by eminent composers, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Julia Wolfe, William Bolcom, Jennifer Higdon, Zhou Long, and Bernard Rands; MacArthur “Genius” Award recipients Tyshawn Sorey, Bright Sheng, and Miguel Zenón; and US Artists Fellow Susie Ibarra. PRISM’s discography includes releases on Albany, BMOP/Sound, ECM, innova, Koch, Naxos, New Dynamic, New Focus, and its own label, XAS Records. The Fifth Century, PRISM’s ECM recording with The Crossing, was awarded a 2018 Grammy for Best Choral Performance. In 2016, PRISM was named by its alma mater, the University of Michigan, as the first recipient of the Christopher Kendall Award in recognition of its work in “collaboration, entrepreneurship, and community engagement.” The PRISM Quartet performs exclusively on Selmer saxophones.

Keep in Touch. Visit PRISM at prismquartet.com, and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, and YouTube.

Photo by Ara Howrani

1–8 The Anchoress (2018)

Music by David Serkin Ludwig (b. 1974) Poetry by Katie Ford (b. 1975) Hyunah Yu (soprano), PRISM Quartet Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

9–11 Three Anchoress Songs (2018)

by David Serkin Ludwig Mimi Stillman flute, piccolo Matthew Levy tenor saxophone

Executive Producer/Mastering: Matthew Levy Producers: David Serkin Ludwig, PRISM Quartet Principal Session Engineer: John O. Senior Associate Session Engineers: Brendan McGeehan, Nancy Kimmons Editing/Mixing: Matthew Levy, David Serkin Ludwig Artwork/Design: OfficeOfDevelopment.com XAS Records is the label of the PRISM Quartet ©Ⓟ PRISM Quartet, Inc. 2020 All Rights Reserved prismquartet.com/xas XAS 110

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