Safe, Dark, Motionless, Airless

Marshall Jones

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Chorus

5 min.

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Program Notes: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to keep it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Text: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis © C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd 1960. Used by permission This is a text that was once used by a friend to describe something they saw me doing. I think that it is something we have all struggled with since the spring of 2020. Whether it be the isolation of remaining distant from others or the isolation of being in our own echo chambers, only listening to news or social media that reinforces our own views rather than listening and learning from someone with a different view, we have locked up our hearts in the coffins of our own selfishness. In so many ways, those 4 words that Lewis uses to describe that place: safe, dark, motionless, airless describe the experience of this past year and a half. This work is full of text painting related to texture as well as melody and harmony—-for example, the lone isolated solo line that enters with “to love at all is to be vulnerable”, all choral parts compressing in to where all parts are tightly packed within an interval of a third on the text “but in that casket”. In addition to the text paining there is always this shift between two extremes.. lyrical lines and short percussive motives, painting the extremes that have become more apparent in our world as we fail to heed Lewis’ warning not to lock up our hearts in the coffins of our selfishness.
Ensemble Name: Glacier Chorale