The inspiration for this work came from a clairvoyant trance reading by the American Prophet Edgar Cayce on Christ's Last Supper. After describing the scene in a manner consistent with the descriptions in the canonical gospels, but with much more detail, Cayce said "They sing the ninety-first Psalm? - he that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God; in Him I trust. He is the musician as well, for He uses the harp. They leave for the garden." (Reading 5749-1). When I first read this passage many years prior to composing the work, I was stricken by this imagery of Christ accompanying his disciples on the harp in the singing of this Psalm and recalled that as a youth I had seen in a book a photograph of a small statuette dating back to early Christianity depicting Christ as a seated musician playing the harp. When the request for a choral work came from the two choirs I saw it as an opportunity to set this Psalm to music and asked the choirs for permission to add a harp to the instrumentation. They agreed and I embarked on the task of setting Psalm 91 to music, which proved to be more problematic than I originally anticipated.
I started working on the piece in late August 2007 and by December of that year I had made no progress at all, having discarded two earlier attempts to find the right "sound" for this work. For someone like me who composes straight "from the heart' with no other deliberate composing methodology whatsoever, when nothing springs out from inside, one is confronted with impenetrable darkness both exteriorly and interiorly. I realized soon enough that this particular subject required the kind of meditation and focus that I was not according it at that time. It also required the kind of insight into this particular text that I did not possess. The text of Psalm 91 read like any other Psalm. So why our Master, at this special moment, pregnant with significance, when He was giving His final admonitions to His friends and dear ones before embarking on His history-altering self-sacrifice would use the text of this Psalm as His parting words. If the text refers to Jesus Himself, then how does the promise "there shall no evil befall thee" square with the fact that, very soon after singing this Psalm, every conceivable evil befell Him as He had already told everyone in His company. Through meditation but also through composing with spiritual trepidation, for I was scrutinizing truths beyond my worth, I began to unravel the story told by the psalmist. The story of saving one's Life by offering it as burned offering to the altar of the Creative Forces or God; that the real evil is our separation from our source of spiritual nourishment, not the physical suffering or even death which can actually act as catalysts for spiritual understanding. To see this, one needs to get close to the "secret place" of which the psalmist speaks at the very opening of Psalm 91.
This "secret place" became the central and recurring theme in my setting. After failing to set this opening line to music twice, I finally went to this place by having the harp play a simple tune while the choristers whisper quietly the texts of the opening line. Whispering, inhaling and exhaling and humming are the sounds that draw the listener inwards to this secret place that resides deep within us and makes our contact with the unseen world possible. Psalm 91 begins and ends this way. In between, the music is like a series of windows opening and revealing some hidden meaning of the text. Extreme textures and registers, precarious vocal balances, sound effects like tone clusters, thunder effects on the harp, stomping of feet and aleatoric (chaotic) vocal lines, all are used to reveal the majesty of this text and the majesty of its ultimate fulfillment on that seminal evening in Rome-occupied Jerusalem or on every other evening in our past, present and future, when someone wills to overcome one's self and take on one's cross of self-sacrifice, for there is no other road towards oneness with the Divine. It is only then that we can know God's name and call upon Him. It is only then that "no evil shall befall us".
