New Music USA Online Library

Therefore

Joelle Wallach

Therefore is one of Joelle Wallach’s Spiritual Speculations, a series of short works for chamber choir or vocal quartet which probe the puzzle of living with conscience in a flawed world. Therefore‘s words encourage engagement in the only world we have, but its interwoven, wordless sighs lament a lost if illusory ideal. As Therefore ends, those sighs subsume the words; the voices veer toward and away from one another, yearning for yet mourning a profoundly imperfect world, and meanwhile creating their own accord. Therefore Nothing exists that is not marred, therefore we are obliged to imagine how things might be: the sea at its green uttermost, the shore white to exaggeration, white before it was checked and clouded by its spent debris. Nothing exists that does not end, and so to knowledge we must deliberately be untrue: you murmuring that you will not go, when you will go, promising to do always what you cannot do: hold the sun steady and the sky new. No one exists who can be loved the same by day as by dark; it is that sleeping place, lame, we attempt to follow into, and cannot trace, that makes us lie, saying we know his face, as if we knew even half of his true name. William Dickey

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