Wormwood was created as a response to a commission by the Gryphon Trio, Canada's pre-eminent piano trio, for a concert on April 9, 2006 at Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. The forces available for that concert were a bass baritone (Pavlo Hunka), a number of combined choirs who participated separately in different presentations during the event and the trio. Along the way, as the ideas for the work gradually unfolded, I requested that we add a rap singer and a child soprano for isolated appearances in two movements of the work.
As is usual with my music, many forces come together to shape the inspiration for each composition. In this case the starting point was a conversation with a young monk at Mt. Athos, a monastic community in northern Greece, nearly 20 years earlier during which I was told that "Chernobyl was predicted in The Book of Revelation". It was not an unusual statement to come from the mouth of an Orthodox monk, given the pronounced apocalyptic tenor of eastern Christian mysticism to which I was accustomed to since childhood. This statement, however, did not make specific sense to me until one day shortly before embarking on the composition I asked Roman Borys, the cellist of the Gryphon Trio who is of Ukrainian background, whether the word "Chornobyl" (the Ukrainian name for Chernobyl) meant anything in particular in his ancestral tongue. When he said that it meant "Wormwood", the English word for Apsinthos (the name of the "death star" in the Book of Revelation that was hurled to the earth and poisoned the planet's waters, causing a great many people to die) I knew right away that the appropriate passages from the Book of Revelation (Chapters 8 and 9) would provide the bulk of the text for this work. The eerie name coincidence between a 2000-year-old book and a contemporary catastrophic event was enough to get my creative juices flowing.
For a person like me, steeped in Christian mysticism and in the belief that, even in its darkest moments, human history is our individual and collective response to a divine plan for the salvation of humankind, a text like The Book of Revelation is not easy to ignore or pretend it is not there. The reason why I have not used this text in any of my previous works based on Biblical subjects is probably because apocalyptic texts embody the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophesies. This is a widely acknowledged danger that has concerned sages and students of prophesy alike throughout the centuries: for example, God instructs Daniel to keep the last prophesies of his book sealed till the "fulfillment of Time" and Nostradamus by his own admission intentionally scrambles his predictions of the future so that they do not become a tool for evil in the wrong hands. But prophesy is also a demonstration that history is not the cumulative interaction of surface causalities or haphazard events, such as natural disasters or human error; that history is not ruled by chance but by a far more complex and purposefully designed plan for humanity's spiritual ascent. Finally, like in the Book of Jonas, prophesy is a warning rather than a fixing of events that are predestined regardless of our personal and collective response. The fact that prophesy is fulfilled at all is an indication that we, individually and as a species, have not heeded to its warning. Due to this inherent complexity and nature of prophesy, I have avoided apocalyptic texts in my work, preferring instead devotional texts. Until now, that is.
While meditating on the apparent appropriateness of the selected texts from the Book of Revelation for this particular project, I remembered that years ago I read about a collective study of this book by a prayer group in Virginia Beach in the early 1940s under the guidance of Edgar Cayce, America's greatest prophet and one of the most powerful influences on my own thinking and work. According to this study, the Book of Revelation is a detailed description of the transformative processes taking place within the body, mind and soul of an individual who begins to resonate with the "Christ pattern", or "wears on the Christ", as mystical Christianity would call the same phenomenon. Thus, the "seven churches", "seven seals", "seven angels", "seven bowls" etc. refer to various transformations - and resistances to such transformations thereof - within the body which are associated with the seven Chakras or energy centers, which in turn are associated with the various glands of the endocrine system. Central to this approach is the belief that a historical meeting with the triumphant Christ will not take place in the arena of human history before it takes place in the form of a mystical union within us. Therefore, the ultimate battle between good and evil, the Armageddon, is first and foremost an internal process of spiritual transformation and emancipation. It is this internal process that is being described in John's Book of Revelation. Part of it is the description of a transpersonal process common to all human beings, while another part describes John's own personal enlightenment as he, in a state of heightened awareness, was witnessing this transformation taking place within him. According to this account, the nature of religious experience within individuals is not uniform. In the opening, John distinguishes between seven such states calling them the "seven churches". He begins his writing by criticizing the false comfort that many churches/individuals find in their own recipes for collective/personal salvation; where potentially (but not always) "empty" ritual becomes a substitute for profound spiritual experience.
Once I decided to explore this interior aspect of the Book of Revelation in Wormwood, it became clear that I would need to also add my own texts which redirect the universal and apocalyptic towards the internal and personal. So I copied the text from the eighth and ninth chapters from a small compact Bible (which two "Gideon" missionaries gave me on my way to work just a few days before embarking on this composition), turned the prose narrative into "stanzas" with minimal interference with the original text, and then interpolated stanzas of my own text between the original ones which matched the rhythm and flow of the original text. At the end of this process I had what amounted to lyrics, ready for musical setting.
Lyrics were appropriate for what I had in mind for the music. Apocalyptic texts, like the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass crave for "apocalyptic" music treatment, like in Verdi's Requiem or Pederecki's Passion, and I have certainly visited that route in my own earlier work Constantinople. In Wormwood, however, I wanted to explore other musical traditions in which Biblical text has found a comfortable home in the past, and which were perhaps lying outside my own musical radar screen. It was partly because of this, and partly because of the fact that, as I was meditating on the Chernobyl disaster, another disaster in New Orleans was occupying the television screens of North America and the thoughts of people around the world, (and yet another one soon after than in Pakistan and North India), that my attention was also drawn to more contemporary events of an equally apocalyptic nature. If this work was to alert us to an apocalyptic "here" and "now" and to the mounting pressure upon individuals for their transformative process to reach a critical stage by an imminent deadline, then the music should urgently invoke not only the music of the past, but the "here" and "now" of our current culture. The various popular music idioms explored in the music of Wormwood stem from this desire to come to grips with this "here" and "now".
The predominance of Gospel music in this work reflects another preoccupation of mine during the past few years that has to do with how Christian fundamentalism is shaping current American politics. It has been difficult for me to reconcile how communities of decent people living according to Christian principles can identify with, and become the power base of, politics of greed, exploitation and blatant disregard for human life and welfare; how we can consider ourselves to be pious and not demand of ourselves and of our elected representatives to be "our brother's keeper". Unless one is ready to admit widespread hypocrisy at a frightening scale, something that my belief in humanity's potential for good will never allow me to accept, some other "decoding" of this picture is necessary. Perhaps at fault is the literal interpretation of scripture, particularly apocalyptic scripture. It feels that the fundamentalist view of Middle-Eastern politics has more to do with the desire to turn the Book of Revelation into a self-fulfilling prophesy than with any real concern about the welfare of millions of people who suffer daily to no small extend because of (our and their) wrongly conceived religious devotion. The exuberant and militant tenor of The Seventh Seal, the second movement of Wormwood, reflects this attitude. It is the "us versus them" mentality mistaken for religious sentiment, exhilarating as the music may be otherwise. Yet, in spite the militant fervour of this movement, the text also reveals an opening up to the internal process of "wearing on the Christ"; it represents a "station of the Cross" in our own spiritual unfolding.
This internal progress of spiritual emancipation, which is also the deepest structure of this work, does not follow a continuous ascending trajectory. It rises and falls and, consistent with a number of spiritual disciplines including Buddhism, it falls to its lowest just before the moment of enlightenment. Thus, after The Golden Censer, the third movement of the work, which represents a timeless moment of spiritual repose followed by the brief apocalyptic moment of The Beginning of the End, the fifth movement returns to the musical heritage of The Seventh Seal, but this time it deconstructs the spirit of this earlier movement and examines its makeup, unconvinced by its exuberance and idealistic fervor. The First Four Trumpets, the fifth movement, is a central turning point in the work. It starts with the exuberance of the earlier music, at a point reminiscent of the 1960's "apocalyptic" pop song The Age of Aquarius, but it also contains a 12-tone row, initially introduced in the first movement which appears with increasing frequency throughout this movement, leading the music into a descending motion towards darkness. This descending motion continues over the next three movements: In The Fifth Angel, the baritone soloist is replaced by a rap singer in a mechanical, rhythmically unsettling rendering of the Biblical texts, while the music of The Sixth Angel reflects on the music of the third movement (its "Byzantine" chanting for the baritone and the more spacious choral writing). This stylistic and thematic mirroring in the structure, however, does not impede on the constant, forward moving, deeper structure of the work as a whole. In this sense, The Sixth Angel, has a sense of dramatic and tragic tension that is absent from The Golden Censer, to which it is stylistically indebted. It is part of the consciousness of having fallen spiritually, which is more fully realized in the following movement, The Final Plagues. Here, in this penultimate movement where the 12-tone row and its timbral-textural extensions reach a dark culminating point and, additionally, imply an unholy association with the Gospel music of The Seventh Seal, the baritone soloist is simply narrating the text, having no longer any energy or inclination to sing.
The use of the piano trio in this work is multifold: sometimes it is comfortably cast in its traditional role, like in the first and fourth movements); sometimes it is cast as a pop band accompanying the lead singer (the baritone) and the background vocalists (the choir), like in the second, fifth, sixth and ninth movements. Yet at other times an entire movement profiles only one of the three instruments, the cello in The Golden Censer, or the piano in The Sixth Angel. Even though the music of Welcome to the New Jerusalem, the last movement of Wormwood, does not share any thematic or stylistic material with the rest of the work (as, I suspect, Enlightenment does not share any understandings with the processes that lead up to it), all the tensions, hidden symmetries and deeper structure of the work converge towards it. Welcome to the New Jerusalem is sung by a child soprano, a metaphorical last-minute addition to the cast of characters in the work, and for quite a while it is accompanied by a solo violin, the only instrument of the piano trio not individually profiled so far in the work. The child soprano represents the spiritual rebirth of the central character in the work, the baritone, consistent with Jesus' admonition "unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3) or Isaiah's prophesy "and a little child shall lead them" (Isaiah 11:6). The music and the text of this song came to me almost at once one morning during a walk with my wife in the Durham forest close to our home, outside of Uxbridge, Ontario. I am grateful to God for these moments, for they happen when least expected and with no effort or labour on my part. In some ways, and in a manner consistent with the deeper structure of Wormood, the entire work can be seen as a creative anticipation of this particular moment. It was only then that everything that precedes Welcome to the New Jerusalem made complete sense to me. Over the years of composing music, I have grown to trust that the spiritual journey which composition is should not be rationally premeditated but should instead be based on spiritual trust and on the belief that, when a composer sets up him/herself as a spiritual channel, something will ultimately happen that will redeem this trust and faith and will make this enterprise worthwhile for others who, like the composer, have embarked on a similar spiritual journey of self-discovery. For Wormwood, the flowering of this trust, the moment of enlightenment, was this vision of a child leading the procession of nine movements (the numerological number of the Christ) to its luminous conclusion in the form of a simple song.
