for large orchestra, with choral introduction
Text by St. Augustine, from Confessions (Robert Bly translation, used with permission)
Duration: The piece in total lasts approximately 22 minutes if the choral introduction is performed, 17 minutes without.
A few years ago, the University of Colorado Boulder commissioned me to write an orchestral work for their 100th anniversary celebrations that were to happen in the fall of 2020. Of course, the timing of the pandemic ended up delaying that event until 2022, and as was maybe to be expected, in the period I was composing the work I ended up going into a more internal space- less extroverted and celebratory, and more contemplative.
What had been obsessively on my mind during the pandemic was a short text from St. Augustine’s Confessions. It was a rumination on the nature and mystery of time, and it seemed to me that there was something both religious but at the same time more modern in its sentiment- it had an almost physicist’s take on time embedded in it.
In my work, On the Bridge of the Eternal, there is a short unaccompanied choral introduction setting the St. Augustine text. Parts of the musical material from that choral introduction are absorbed into the orchestral work that follows it. The body of the orchestral work does not include the chorus singing.
The piece in total lasts approximately 22 minutes if the choral introduction is performed, 17 minutes without.
St. Augustine text:
Oh Lord,
a long time is only long because it is made of
many successive moments which cannot be extended.
In the eternal nothing is transient but the whole is present.
All past time is driven backwards by the future,
All future time is consequent of the past.
All past and future are created and set on their course by
That which is always present.
Who will lay hold of the human heart to make it still,
So that it can see how eternity in which there is neither past nor future
Stands still?
—Christopher Theofanidis
Biography