Score, parts and preparatory audio files in preparation

Verse 1:                              To love purely is to consent to distance

Verse 2:                              I cannot love without trembling

Verse 3:                              Buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the                                                       silence of God

Verse 4:                              Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer

Cadenza:       Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity

In the last year of her life, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her friend Gustave Thibon, ‘Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.’ In Gravity and Grace (published posthumously by Thibon), Weil wrote about the nature of distance and separation, expanding on Plato’s concept of metaxu—i.e. that which both separates and connects—grounding her mystical philosophy in the idea (to summarise crudely) that every absence can be interpreted as presence. ‘Every separation is a link.’

Thirty years earlier, following a period of upheaval as Greece resisted Ottoman rule, the Epirot violinist Alexis Zoumbas left his mountain home in Northern Greece for the USA. In New York, he recorded his mournful shimmering music—including several examples of moiroloi, an improvisatory composition of keening gestures and flickering flame-like ornamentation. The moiroloi compositions refer to the moirologia funeral laments of the women of Epirus, and invoke the feeling of xenatia (a Greek word which translates to English as ‘a catastrophic longing for home’). In these recordings, one can clearly hear the immigrant’s connection to the reality-presence of home, through the act—as in Weil’s metaxu—of singing its absence.

This concerto is about the basic human need to lament, that is, to speak the distance / sing the separation (in a trajectory loosely narrated by the Weil quotations that name each of the concerto’s sections). It is also about Alexis Zoumbas. Using one of his moiroloi recordings as a source, I sang-along many times (first to Zoumbas, then to myself) in a ritualised, meditative process I call ‘automatic singing’. This method transformed the moiroloi into the violist’s trembling-loving-mourning sighs. Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream —a space of separation-connection-absence-presence—in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.