Completed: January, 2018.

Instrumentation: SATB chorus (with divisi) and string quartet.

Commissioned by Amor Artis, and dedicated to Amor Artis and Ryan James Brandau.

Text: adapted from “Child of the Lonely Heart,” first published in Towards Democracy (1905), by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). Public domain.

This piece may be performed in conversation with Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (1680), as it quotes from that piece’s “Surge, amica mea” movement.

Program note

Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri forces us to gaze long and hard at the body of the crucified Christ. In To the Side, I combine a quotation from this piece with a portion of a poem by the English poet Edward Carpenter, who was also a philosopher and an early advocate of homosexual rights. Carpenter’s poetry, like portions of the biblical text quoted here, blur lines between religious devotion and secular love. For every painful and pleasurable stab of Carpenter’s poetry, I inject painful and pleasurable dissonances into the string lines, as the chorus searches for a place removed from this great, turbulent ocean.