feeld songs - Choir and Harp

Ensemble: SATB Choir, Harp

Duration: 40 Minutes

Written: Fall/Winter 2019

Text by Jos Charles

Excerpts Premiere: March 10, 2020
55 W 13th St, New York NY 10011

Full Premiere: KC VITAs, May 30, 2021
St. James Catholic Church, Liberty, MO

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I. its ther / inn the feeld
II. fete upended
III. & if the earth is flat
IV. lik dayelite on hils

V. deepre eech yere

VI. befor the
VII. the principld skye
VIII. windoe / that is the whorld
IX. mothe inn the guarden

X. Medalyons

Projection Slides

Program Note:

When you read Jos Charles’ feeld, there’s a sense of disorientation with glimmers of familiarity, playfully taunting from behind a curtain. The language unfurls at the speed of your curiosity, just as you'd come to know someone whose gender presentation might be new to you. It’s not just about comprehension, but delighting in the work of recognition—witnessing somebody's becoming, unbecoming, and everything in between.

Much of feeld songs was written in spare moments between graduate courses during my first semester at Mannes School of Music. I walked this music around the streets of Greenwich Village countless times during that fall semester, learning the contours of their shape and form. Composing feeld songs also marked a milestone in my own gender journey—while many of the poems felt like balm, others loomed like opaquely cloaked doulas, waiting in the wings for a future time. I began writing knowing that I didn't have exact language for what the text meant to me. (That language wouldn’t come for years.) Yet this is exactly what Jos Charles embraces in feeld: our inarticulable experiences have the power to lead, and language is an imperfect container to be shaped, struggling to keep up. My inarticulable identification with the poems was as unhelpfully ambiguous as it was a somatic cornerstone, joining the text in a resounding “yes—keep going.” The work emerged both humble and sprawling—its fullness both quirked and blossoming within the container of words and music.

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After a short harp prelude, I. its ther / inn the feeld sets the scene. The contours of the feeld are defined as the narrator reports their findings through ecological metaphor, situated as the other. Each tree a person, each interaction an ecological shift, with the harp spinning nimble thread below. II. fete upended gushes and splays, with the text spinning brilliant metaphors about courtship, survival sex work, and the politics of desire. In III. & if the earth is flat, the harp works its way through interlocking cyclical patterns, and the choir chants out a psalm of alternative facts—a spiral of "if, then's" in haunting choral unison. The final lines, "& if the hors knew the feeld from its bit / wut is or isnt a book" ask "If we could tell the rest of the world from our small part—what is or isn't fiction—then what?"

IV. lik dayelite on hils is a sacrificial song; a coming out that ultimately ends in estrangement. The parental figures stew and scorn in metaphor as the harp lurches and the narrator pleads; the person they once were is gradually engulfed by a roaring choir. When the dust settles—just as transness has remained inextinguishable since the beginning of time—the narrator's authentic self endures, represented by a radiant shimmer of harp tone that gets the last word.

Following this familial break, V. deepre eech yere arrives as the sparsest song in the set. The choir hauntingly morphs between exasperations of text and ghostly consonants. Angular spurts from the harp softly interrupt like lingering raindrops after a storm; an uncomfortable silence looms. In the narrator's solitude, VI. befor the opens wide, churning up another thought spiral of unanswerable questions. The choir hovers like a quiet swarm of bees while the harp takes the foreground. The texture soon bubbles over, dissolving into an open-ended space that moves away from the both the window and the daydream.

In VII. the principled skye, the narrator speaks with bolder certainty, defying respectability norms of the feeld. (It is perhaps fitting that the composer wrote this song last in the creative process.) The choir splits into different chamber configurations, singing in an embellished style akin to medieval-era organum. Some of the most upward-punching sentences in the set are found here: "undre the principld skye / ther is no vulnerabilitie / onlie wut protrudes." "& thees lyons leckynge mye woond / expectynge 2 finde / a woond / ther is historie inn this / wood".

In VIII. windoe / that is the whorld, we are called back to the feeld's indifference. Even as the narrator becomes more fully realized, the world resists change. The penultimate song in the set, IX. mothe inn the guarden, slowly unravels to the point of coming undone. The narrator ponders the life-expectancy of trans people:  "just shye off 27 / its such a plesure to be alive / inn this trembeled soot / u lent / shock is a struktured responce". A repeating bass line (also known as a passacaglia) in the harp adds endless coats of paint to a canvas, or names to an unending list of lives lost. The anger that has been building up in the narrator's heart throughout the cycle reaches awe-striking catharsis, here, threatening to tear the entire musical texture apart. Just before the breaking point, the music deflates, plunging into an ocean of crooning, mournful hums.

X. Medalyons ends the set on a deeply sweet and optimistic note. Calling to mind the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the text turns to the ways in which nature gives so much of itself unasked. Like walking through a land stewarded by those who came before you, for your sake, the set's finale is a grateful love letter to softness, to the confidant, and to the power of care.

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Four songs (I, III, V, and X) were first performed at Mannes School of Music on March 10, 2020. The world premiere was given by KC VITAs in May 2021.

*Click on each title to view a score preview

Projection Slides

Excerpts Premiere, March 2020: