O Maria [2025]

for six voices (SMzCtTBarB) and string quartet

duration :: 25’

Written for Ekmeles and Mivos Quartet — commissioned by Chamber Music America

First performance :: Ekmeles and Mivos Quartet— 1 November 2025 — DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York, NY

I’ve written a piece about ekstasis before (contemptus mundi for clarinet and piano), but that ekstasis—as the title suggests—is a violent one, an ekstasis of martyrdom and self-flagellation. O Maria is also a piece about ekstasis but the ekstasis of O Maria is the opposite: peaceful, undemonstrative, almost invisible, distant, steeped in a passive sort of wonder, made of sublimation and evaporation.

O Maria is a study in flickering, made of a collage of monodies, canons, litanies, and codas. It begins with what you could call a positive flickering, small, ineloquent pinpricks; then there is a long, slow, hesitant dialogue between different varieties of positive and negative flickering, which is a sort of thorough, almost self-similar perforation. There are two texts, more or less cross-faded. The first is floating fragments from the meditative devotional text of John Browne’s famous, massive antiphon O Maria salvatoris mater, culminating in a litany of supplication for a sort of intellectual rapture: “Rogamus et Frideswidam, // Magdalenam, Catharinam // doctam philosophia…” The second is from the Elizabethan mystic John Dee’s essay for an edition of Euclid’s Elements, the so-called “Mathematicall Preface”: first (mumbled fragments of) a discourse on number and the act of numbering as a ladder to the divine, and finally a flickering choralecoda: “May we be lifted upward by degrees, towards the conceiving…”