Stephen Jaffe : WORKS CROSSING SACRED AND SECULAR BOUNDARIES
Since the early 1990s I have been creating a category of musical works which purposefully cross secular and sacred boundaries. I first noticed a “crossing” orientation when composing Offering, a trio for flute, harp and viola in 1996. Creating it I was aware of not only instrumental possibility but also the music’s spiritual, spatial dimension (perhaps it was the effect of those plucked harp strings…). I wrote that I meant the title metaphorically:
Offering as both noun and active verb, as if trying, as in sculpture, to catch that elusive moment when a gesture captures the transition from a state of readiness to an action. When the athlete leaps, the musician draws a bow, or when a person is moved to action, the improbable jump or realization in which they surpass themselves is both an offering (noun) and an offering (verb). [Links to sound and citations appear at the end of this post.]
Similar yearning guides other compositions, sometimes bearing overtly spiritual or even political messages. At seventy, as I contemplate photos of our planet like the Blue Dot taken in the waning days of the Voyager 1 Space telescope (showing Earth) I am sure that my musical output is as much spiritual as it is abstract. It is an essence, an emphasis often present in my music, expressing an attitude that cultivates what the poet Mary Oliver described as a goal for her poems — that they should have “spiritual purpose.” My artistic purpose is indeed to awaken spiritual connection. I hope my music will open the listener’s brain and heart.
Crossing Secular and Sacred: Choral and Vocal Music
Some pieces that “cross from the secular into the sacred” have texts. I mention two cantatas.
Songs of Turning, composed for the Oregon Bach Festival in 1996, features texts ranging from an anonymous woman seeking advice from the newspaper columnist Ann Landers to Harold Kushner’s rabbinic dwelling on it, to the Psalms, and to poetry by Mary Oliver and Denise Levertov, whose poems refract Buddhist and socially-active religion. I would say Songs of Turning is an ecumenical cantata inspired by a long line of religious teaching. It was outrageous to write an aria to an Ann Landers column about a woman who has inadvertently caused a terrible accident and then in the same work to link to the Psalms, to the Buddha’s Last Instruction and to Isaiah’s vision for peace, as recontextualized by Denise Levertov. Using a gossip column in a sacred work wasn’t outrageous, it turned out. Nor was it without precedent: Bach’s cantatas and Gospel music weave personal testimony and group response together. They allow participants to cross from real life to spiritual life. Why couldn’t I do it? The response among the circle of singers, soloists, audiences, etc. was overwhelming, and I have never forgotten what it means to use real life as an entry way to sacred space. In Songs of Turning I imagined the chorus, the soloists and the audience as part of the circle of telling. As a result the work came alive. It was imbued with the meaning of everyone “crossing.”
And speaking of the choice of texts to set in music, the 2018 cantata A Forest Unfolding, shaped collaboratively with eight writers led by Richard Powers and my composing colleagues Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner and David Kirkland Garner, uses a rich array of poems and stories ranging from W.S. Merwin to Anne LaBastille, Thoreau, the Book of Job and Richard Powers. Over thirty-five minutes it traces a narrative arc from human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together.
Part of A Forest Unfolding’s message is the collaborative form. We aimed that “a collective process of many makers would yield a work in the cantata tradition about the need for human reintegration with the rest of the deeply collaborative living world.” In this work for narrator, soprano, baritone soloists and instruments, the collaborative nature of the composing process echoed the ways trees communicate and protect each other in community. This was our major artistic and philosophical choice, and it makes for a piece which is varied, narrative, and (we hope) never boring or preachy. It invites. Indeed it crosses. The narrated and sung texts can sound conversational:
“Sometimes at night when a problem has me turning and twisting in the silent sleeping loft, I get up, wake the dog, and glide onto the lake in my guideboat…”.
They can wrathfully confront human ignorance:
Addressing Job, God asks “Who is this whose ignorant words smear my design with darkness? Stand up now like a man; I will question you: please, instruct me. Where were you when I planned the earth? Tell me, if you are so wise. Do you know who took its dimensions, measuring its length with a cord? What were its pillars built on? Who laid down its cornerstone, while the morning stars burst out singing and the angels shouted for joy!..”
And the texts and music inspire us with wonder:
“Networked together underground by countless thousand miles of living threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites. . . .Her trees are far more social than anyone suspects. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest…”.
Being part of the making of A Forest Unfolding was a special experience to be part of. It arcs beyond what its individual makers—writers-performers-composers- could have separately achieved.
And that is its major purpose.
Crossing Secular and Sacred: Instrumental/Vocal Music (What’s in a Name?)
I tend not to write a piece and then slap on a title or compose outward from an idea. Instead I like to let the notes lead me into their musical territory, searching and playing to find the most resonant combinations. Once a form has taken shape, usually late in the creative process rather than at the beginning, I ask if words I could assign as a title would accurately describe the spirit of the music. Could they suggest a poetic essence different than say, trio or invention? I describe three works below, emphasizing how naming them differs from the practices of conceptual art, where everything flows from one preset idea, or program music. My practice also differs from a particular phenomenon in music— symphonies the critic Andrew Porter perhaps too derisively dismissed as “postcard pieces”, feeling their political message was overbearing.
The Names of Three Works: Migrations, Inscriptions and Tableaux
Three of my instrumental works that suggest crossing from secular to sacred are MIGRATIONS (Chamber Concerto No. 4, 2017), INSCRIPTIONS (Double Concerto) for flute and bassoon soli and string quintet (2025), which is my sixth chamber concerto, and TABLEAUX, a 30-minute work for solo piano (2022).
In MIGRATIONS (Chamber Concerto No. 4) for walking violin soloist and chamber ensemble (2017), the soloist literally walks while playing, beginning in the rear of the hall and approaching the stage to interact with different groups of instruments dispersed around the stage. The violinist’s migration through the hall constitutes the form of the work, which eventually concludes as the soloist exits the stage to lead the rest of the ensemble in an antiphony across space and time. Migrations’ ten movements have titles, e.g. Spirit Walking, Glass Harmonica/Oud-Wood, and Memory and were written as I witnessed the great drama of migration in 2016. At the premiere I wrote:
Rather than evocations of specific events (of which there are none) these images are like emblems. Migration may be free. It may be forced, single or en masse; The Great Migration or the Flight from Egypt. Its memory lives on for generations as culture-bearing people attempt to gain equilibrium in new lands…my concerto’s only specific contribution to political discourse would be if it opened the heart or mind… [Migrations] is mostly a musical idea. But music—even the most abstract kind—can serve to keep the ray of hope alive.
In brief, MIGRATIONS is music in the theater of space and concerns itself both with literal migration of musicians and with spiritual condition of migration. Imagined for, and first presented in 2017 in Duke’s newly renovated acoustic jewel for listening, Baldwin Auditorium, Gabriel Richard was the violin soloist.
2. INSCRIPTIONS (Double Concerto) for flute and bassoon soli and string quintet (2025) was commissioned by Mike Harley and Jennifer Parker-Harley leading a consortium of flutists and bassoonists from around the United States.INSCRIPTIONS is abstract music that is influenced first and foremost by the sounds of the soloists: flute and bassoon. Across three movements, INSCRIPTIONS also “crosses”, connecting to textual traditions.
Here’s how I outlined such thinking, and the order in which I did it, for Duke students at a seminar in 2024. Its approach unites abstraction with textual images. This is a little complicated, as abstraction, like that pursued by non-representational artists in the last century, usually eschews reference in favor of composition “stemming from the materials themselves”.
Except when a more poetic attitude was needed to communicate the full idea!
Here is collagist Irwin Kremen, whose practice was forged in the crucible of Black Mountain College, writing about his astonishment when referential images crept in to what was a fully abstract art. Writing about his Re’eh series, referencing the Holocaust, Kremen insisted that “a collage-of-my-kind should stand for itself and only itself, be a presentation and not a representation.”
But then he also noted:
[The Re’eh series] would push against the grain of my own practice, for I would have to make collages given to theme and reference that otherwise I would unquestionably reject…I resolved to continue working in my usual way, striving always for a collage-of-my-kind and, as it happened, the works that resulted assimilated reference to the nonrepresentational mode. [Emphasis mine-SJ] (https://www.irwinkremen.com/reeh.html)
I elaborated on a parallel process– assimilated reference as described by Kremen- in my presentation about my new concerto, INSCRIPTIONS for Duke composers:
INCRIPTIONS has three movements (Attention, Solo and Low Country/Low Country Wiggle). I want to talk about the first movement, Attention. The movement’s quality of Attention emanates from the pulse—and from the dialogue between the flute and bassoon soloists with the string ensemble. In notes I wrote that “a shofar-like refrain may have been inspired by a talk I heard on why the shofar is not sounded when the Jewish New Year occurs on Shabbat.” (The shofar is a ram’s horn which stands for “freedom” and symbolizes that the community should be attuned to its liberatory possibilities: “Wake Up!” “Hear the Revelation of the Divine Law on Mt. Sinai,” , etc. Its raucous, nasal call symbolizes attention, broken-ness, and the possibility of freedom. (A. Green). Because of a prohibition against blowing the horn on the sabbath, the medieval rabbis decided that the shofar should not actually be blown when the Jewish New Year occurred on Shabbat (as in 2023)—and here was the resonant part for me—instead, congregants should “hear the sound internally, like a memory.” The idea of an internal call, remembered but not heard was very potent. A group meditation on a sound that was only heard in the memory!
From another (non-religious) source I remembered a poem by the Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai “When God Left the Earth” in which the people think God must have forgotten the scrolls of the Law below Mt. Sinai and left them behind—a remnant they don’t know what to do with. In other words: an Inscription whose meaning would need to be deciphered and would require interpreters and interpretation.
These are powerful images evoking sound, past, future. How should I acknowledge them?
Revealing the image flow that had arisen from the back of my mind gave me pause as the reality of world events intervened. While the music for the Attention movement was written before the terrible events of October 7, 2023 and the horrific war that has occurred, the danger was that the title or these associations could be interpreted as endorsing a particular political position or being created to lodge a protest (which they were not). And the name of the work needed to be sufficiently flexible to refer to the second and third movements — which are inscriptions of a different kind. Thus, the title INSCRIPTIONS suggests. It lets the music do its work. A classicist friend helped me to craft the summary phrase that “Inscriptions are carvings on stones, writings on paper or digital traces, and audible registering on the ears. All of these require interpreters and interpretation. This is the job of future performers and listeners.”
My Duke seminar concluded as follows, my practice avoiding the simplicity of “this piece is about…”
at the forming stage of the process, I didn’t want an extra-musical conception to intrude on my freedom to learn where the music might lead. At the end stage I didn’t want to assign a name that would change what the music meant for me. I wanted a title which would reflect the situation of the music. Calling it CONCERTO would be equally problematic! Indeed: What’s In a Name?
Finally, some words about TABLEAUX.
III. TABLEAUX (2022) for piano was my first solo piano work in a long time and represented my attempt to make an original contribution to the genre, always something of a touchstone, as it embodies both the public and private spheres of making music.
Tableaux’s music, cast in three large parts, was created for Lisa Emenheiser.
Part I
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- Prelude; 2. Resonances (“Rainbow Resonances”) 3. Opposites: (A) Anthem (B) “Hatred Destroys the World”
Part II
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- Jangle
Part III
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- Partita-Variations: “Every soul is precious”
The tableaux are a suite of short- to medium-length pieces of abstract, non-referential music. Above all, the music is well, just music, and specifically, music for piano solo in the solo tradition as practiced across styles and instruments from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book to the present day. Rainbow reflections uses the full reverberance of the piano, with an improvisatory freedom; Jangle’s pianism is one of percussive and rhythmic physicality; elsewhere the piano is used as if to create a multi-voice chorus. In the latter, the music also invokes literary texts, for which the following applies:
- In Part I, Opposites refers to Lithuania of the 1990s, as a young country grappling with both independence and historical memory. The piano’s music was created from shards of street signs. Anthem (No. 3A) alludes to a billboard seen all over the country, with the fervent words in Lithuanian “Buk sociailai Aktivus”—roughly translated as “Be socially active. Hey! Who will build the country if not you?” While listeners won’t hear a real chorus, I imagined a chorus singing, like the choruses that played such a prominent role in Lithuania’s independence. In contrast, the imaginary chorus that sings Hatred Destroys the World (No. 3B) evokes historical memory. The title refers to an interview given by the late humanitarian Irene Veisaitė—whose testimony is quoted—and to the stone marker, in Yiddish and Lithuanian, standing along Zydu Street in Vilnius commemorating the location of the Small Vilna ghetto. In Hatred Destroys the World it is required that the pianist speak (or half-speak) and sing in English and in Yiddish. The pianistic style might be said to evoke Busoni’s arrangements of Bach’s chorale preludes, but the embedded chorale is not a Lutheran melody; instead it evokes a complex quilt of the recent past, fragments stitched together from shards of the street. The Opposites are the billboard, expressing a fervent wish for the future–and the commemorative marker, asking passersby not to forget the past in building the future.
As if asking a wonderful pianist and future pianists to speak and sing through a headset wasn’t enough, I realized that to balance such a demand made in Part I, the pianist should also do so in Part III, whose variations are based on a chorale theme:
- Emerging from the resonant chords that characterize Tableaux, Part III’s music is fashioned from an original chorale melody inspired by the phrase “Every soul is precious”. These words appear in De Profundis, an essay about a near-death experience by my long-time friend and collaborator, the photographer, writer, and musician Brian Peterson. Returning to consciousness, the author mutters “Every Soul is Precious” and with great effort reaches his camera, snaps, and subsequently sends a shot out into the email ether, later asking “Why? Why did I bother?” His answer? “what was inside was now outside. What wanted to be born, had been born…until the search for something real, something true, had a wisp of a chance to be shared with someone else.” In these concise, and yes, desperate words of the differently abled, my friend illuminates the resonant message: Every soul is precious.
Five variations on the tune follow its initial presentation, leading to a short coda.
*****
To Conclude…
I have never before written about my “crossing” works, perhaps because the concept was too vague or new-agey, or perhaps fearing that I, too, might be dismissed as writing postcard pieces. But as my time on our blue speck of earth is now more limited than before, the opportunity to write my own story leads me to share these thoughts now. I write so that others will notice, and so that these ideas will be encouraging to them, both in their own pursuits — and to understand the attitude which is there in my music.
Paraphrasing Mary Oliver, I want my works to have sincere energy and to have a spiritual purpose. Moreover, I do think there is validity to the claim that these particular works merit a separate category, i.e. not adequately covered on a web page by “Works for Strings”, “Works for Piano”, etc.
I set these ideas down for future listeners and performers as they fully capture a composer’s search to communicate, to live honestly and creatively, in league with music’s importance. I hope listeners will be enriched by exploring these and other works that somewhat audaciously attempt to cross secular boundaries into sacred space.[1]
Links to Works by Stephen Jaffe
Offering [excerpt, 2’30”]
Offering [full recording, 16’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V01OTy4-VrA]
Songs of Turning, from Part One, “The Letter” [ca. 13’]. Sound:
Text : http://www.operatoday.com/documents/Songs_of_Turning.pdf
Migrations Concert Video [17 minutes] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPsUgflVfN8&t=200s
TABLEAUX [30’]: https://sites.duke.edu/sjaffe/2023/03/13/tableaux-at-the-hirshhorn-with-lisa-emenheiser-piano/ NB you have to scroll to 31.28.
A more recent performance by Lisa Emmenheiser of TABLEAUX begins at 30.20 on this video, which also has a link to the program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtRYKrdZZjs
Works Cited
I didn’t want this post to read like an academic article. However, crediting one’s sources is important, and worthy of modelling for others. Here are the sources on which I have relied, using an order of appearance rather than alphabetical order.
The Pale Blue Dot https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/
Oliver, Mary Winter Ploughing The Swan, prose poem related to the spiritual in creativity. (Mariner Books, 1999)
Moore, Tom Opera Today Interview with Stephen Jaffe on Songs of Turning, includes a link to the text.
Powers, Richard, Garner, David, et al: A Forest Unfolding, score preface and text. The score is available from David Garner davekgarner@gmail.com. David is also preparing a web page to be issued in tandem with the recording of the work, to be released in 2026 by New Focus. The web page contains links to live performances of different works. For an essay, see also Powers, Richard and Jaffe, Stephen “We Composed it Collaboratively”.
Jaffe, Stephen Migrations (Chamber Concerto No. 4), Prefatory Note.
Jaffe, Stephen Tableaux for piano, Prefatory Note. Within Tableaux:
-The texts for Opposites, Nos. 3A and 3B appear in Ellen Cassedy We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Used with kind permission of the author. In choral form, Opposites A and B appear in the composer’s choral work in progress, We Are Here [Mes Dar Esame – Mir Zaynen Do – Jesteśmy Tutaj]: Eight Choruses from the North [Working Title].
-Peterson, Brian De Profundis, unpublished essay, 2021. Used with permission of the author.
Kremen, Irwin on the Re’eh Series of collages: https://www.irwinkremen.com/reeh.html
Greyber, Daniel “Silence and the Memory of a Shofar on Shabbat” (Rosh Hashannah talk, September 15, 2023 delivered at Beth El Synagogue, Durham NC).
Sager, Steven English translation, When God Left The Earth (Amichai). https://sichaconversation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/when-god-left-the-earth-amichai.pdf
[1] Other crossing works include OFFERING (1996) for flute, harp and viola, String Quartet No. 2 (“Aeolian and Sylvan Figures”-2004) and HOMAGE TO THE BREATH (2001) for instrumental ensemble, eventually joined by a mezzo-soprano who brings the exploratory, lamenting music of the first two movements to a close. The quartet and Homage to the Breath are beautifully recorded on Bridge (BCD 9653 and 9255) and Offering on Albany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V01OTy4-VrA.
