The Crossing: At Which Point

The Crossing, the elite new-music chamber choir led by Donald Nally, routinely pushes the boundaries of what kinds of music a group of human voices can create. Its recent releases have included David Shapiro’s atheistic mass Sumptuous Planet and a pandemic-themed Christmas album. For At Which Point, their latest release, the choir worked with three composers who take excellent advantage of the ensemble’s strengths and predilections.

At Which Point: A Hooey-free Zone?

Often when I read liner notes with contemporary composers’ commentary on their music I have to swallow an urge to cry “The emperor has no clothes.” Put differently, “What a load of hooey.” It’s not that knowing the inspiration or genesis for a piece of music can’t deepen one’s experience of it, but composers’ verbal explanations too often are little more than pseudo-poetry or sophism. Anyway, I appreciate when music stands on its own without verbal explanation.

Of course, when the music has lyrics, the idea of “meaning” takes on another dimension. How do (or don’t) the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and other technically abstract elements correlate to the sense of the words? Often a choral composer will seem to treat the sung words as mere pegs on which to hang unexpected intervals, experiments in harmonization or vocal technique, or other elements of their compositional voice.

In All Seriousness…

The three works on this album defy contemporary composers’ blathery tendencies in different ways.

On first listening to the title work, a setting by Wang Lu of two evocative poems by Forrest Gander, the music may seem disconnected from the words. For one thing, as with much choral music, it’s very difficult to discern the lyrics anyway, unless (or even if) you’re reading along. After a short, peppery prologue of vocalise, the grief-related lyrics of the first poem, “Beckoned,” begin to spin out. The dominant high voices drop out after a reference to a “tetric silence.” Sprouting walls of sound illustrate phrases and words like “no way out” and “flared.” Quiet whoops and guttural trills effectively suggest the sound of a “vulture-bone flute.”

Portamentos, throat singing, and other extended techniques along with whimsical-nervous cuckoo-like intervals and dizzying counterpoint help drive the setting of the second poem. The words are quite difficult to make out in this music; I found myself compelled to give up trying. Instead of concrete meaning, the piece – a setting of a poem called, not incidentally, “The Sounding” – carries the listener on a thrilling journey of sonic surprises and curiosities.

Infinite Body

Composer Ayanna Woods herself penned the lyrics to her four-movement “Infinite Body.” The lyrical opening movement blooms with pleasing harmonies, its main surprise arising from a keyboard interjection. The powerful second movement, “One Body,” hits with punchy, almost industrial accents that reflect pointed lyrics about society’s pathological pressure on us to “maximize” our energy, productivity, and even downtime. As Woods puts it, it’s about “how capitalism asks us to relate to our bodies, versus what our bodies have to say.” This is an unusual instance of a composer’s seemingly abstract verbal description actually lining up with both music and text.

The smooth sounds of the lyrical “Do Be Do” movement jibe with its text. “Do you worry about falling short? / You know the way water falls; / isn’t it beautiful – dropping the dew?” Woods writes that the music “peers through the lenses of the natural world, burnout culture, and embodiment to observe and unsettle the notion of our separateness.” Oneness with nature is reflected in the solo voice singing over bubbly, wordless “do be dos” from the ensemble. I suspect that Woods understands how the distinction between doing and being is not as simple as it seems.

Ethereal cooing introduces the final movement, “Golden Hour.” The lyrics align human love with oneness with nature. The music positions sturdy chorale-like passages against solo voices and gauzy warblings; the effect is one of peace and relaxation. Chords held impossibly long (surely assisted with electronics) carry the suite to its close. The suspended-fourth of the final word, “golden,” echoes a stereotypical “Amen” from a Christian choral mass, and though the chord never resolves, it drops out in favor of a wordless fadeout that takes the music’s easeful notion to a meditative finish.

Beloved of the Sky

The journals of Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871–1945) contain much reflection on the creative process. For Beloved of the Sky, composer Tawnie Olson set short, telling selections from Carr’s writings, “because I wanted to explore and celebrate the creative process and the search for ‘beauty,’ however defined. And because when I went down deep into myself, I found that they rang true.”

Olson’s settings ring true to this listener. The first short movement has just one lyrical line, and not even a complete sentence at that: “I went down deep into myself and dug up.” It begins with the upper voices, the lower ones not entering until “dug up.” All sections unite for a repeated declaration of the statement, forming an energetic introduction to Olson’s music (and, for that matter, to Carr’s thought).

Light textures and gently complementary parts animate the second movement, “I woke with this idea…,” which is about what Carr calls complementaries, “positive and negative colours in juxtaposition” – just what Olson does, in sonic form, in these passages.

Olson favors the chorale form in several places, including most of the short third movement, a piece about creative blockage. With all singers articulating the same words together, the text is easier to understand.

The fourth movement also begins in chorale; then the sections begin conversing intensely. Pauses dot a phrase about the breath. Rhythms thump on the words “a heartbeat.” The movement climaxes with three achingly harmonized clarion calls on the word “God!” A soprano soloist intones the final thoughts.

The tenors hesitantly open the final movement with the line “I made a small sketch.” The text goes on to describe the content and development of that humble beginning, with the music calmly illustrating the subject of the picture, a “woods…in quiet mood, dreamy and sweet.” A buzzy hum then underpins a solo soprano voice introducing the final statement, where Carr quotes an inspirational phrase from Walt Whitman. The suite concludes with a return to the “small sketch,” ending on one of those haunting tone clusters that The Crossing, a co-commissioner of the piece, delivers so well.

— Jon Sobel, 6.03.2025

Released on April 4 2025, At Which Point (New Focus Recordings) from The Crossing continues the choir’s dedication to commissioning and furthering the genre of choral music. Having commissioned nearly 170 works, often on social justice and environmental topics, this album brings together three works from Ayanna Woods, Wang Lu, and Tawnie Olson. By featuring pieces that examine artistic process and expression as well as experiences of contemporary society, The Crossing have created a cohesive album that must be listened to with the utmost care and attention.

The album opens with Infinite Body by Ayanna Woods, a multi-movement work that examines the ways we bend and shape ourselves in a capitalist society. Through Woods’s text, the work displays a wide array of textures and colors, highlighting the complexity of the choir as a vehicle. The first movement, “Infinite Growth,” immediately arrests the listeners in its intricate beat patterns that create a shimmer atop expansive, lush chords.

Melismatic moments harken back to a modal, sacred style of writing in the midst of truly visionary choral setting and harmonization. Woods also shares her sense of humor in “One Body,”a rhythmic commentary on machinery, systemization, and “order.” The third movement, “Do Be Do,” steps back and allows the listener to reflect on the very real question: “Do you worry about falling short?” The eloquent chords and textures elevates that simple question into a rhetorical reflection, highlighting the underlying fears that intermix with outward facing productivity and success. The blend of old and new returns in the final movement, “Golden Hour,” in which solo heterophonic moments break through soundclouds of inscrutable fog, gorgeous moments of lush density and dissonance.

The title piece, At Which Point, by Wang Lu, features a wide variety of text setting for two surrealist poems by Forrest Gander. The first movement, “Prologue,” is a microtonal adventure of polyphonic swoops and tone clusters that artfully clash with one another, preparing for the second and third movements, “Beckoned” and “The Sounding,” each a setting of a Gander poem of the same name. “Beckoned” describes a wild scene of swarming stinging bees and a cab ride from a flute-playing driver. Lu sets this in a through-composed narrative style, using text painting generously in her interpretation and portrayal of the story. “The Sounding” begins with a stark opening of open fifths and large gaps between the basses and sopranos, creating a cavernous atmosphere for the soloists to glide in and around with dramatic glissandi, almost as if they were birds flying around in the cavern.

Towards the end of the movement, Lu amplifies the sense of fleetingness and spaciousness from the text by adding mouth harps into the texture. The mouth harps create an otherworldly panning through the choir that transport the listener further beyond the initial cavern Lu initially painted. Conductor Donald Nally and The Crossing show clear mastery of their craft in this movement as they balance extreme ranges, textures, and complex writing with exceptional ease.

The final premiere on the album is Tawnie Olson’s Beloved of the Sky. Olson’s work, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment, features five journal entries by Canadian author and artist Emily Carr. In these entries, Carr describes her creative process, one that focuses on often overlooked natural and Indigenous subjects and landscapes. Olson then amplifies these seemingly simple phrases in such a way that word painting falls short of accurate description. In “I went down deep” and “I woke with this idea…,” Olson artfully uses textual and melodic repetition, layering more voices and notes into her phrases and turning a simple unison into a complex harmony over time.

The Crossing exhibits immaculate intonation and blending in the unison moments of the piece, in particular the opening of the third movement, “Oh, that stodgy, lumpy feeling,”that features homophony and intricately subtle counterpoint. Olson’s use of sharp dynamic contrast and homophonic punctuation shines “The subject that means little,”which brings to life the crux of the text’s focus on the subject less examined. The final movement, “I made a small sketch,” beautifully rounds out the cycle and closes the album in its contemplative calls, responses, and lush harmonizations.

The Crossing’s At Which Point is definitely on the “do not miss” list and worthy of a GRAMMY nomination this coming year. Nally’s exceptional conducting and the composers’ beautiful works make the most delicate and strong moments live seamlessly in the program presented on this album.

— Anne Goldberg-Baldwin, 6.18.2025