Interview, Parker Ramsay and Nico Muhly on The Street

Centred around fourteen miniatures for harp, enhanced by reflections written by Alice Goodman and plainchant performed by the Choir of King's College, The Street is a contemporary response to the story outlined by the Stations of the Cross - fourteen freeze-frame scenes from the day of the Crucifixion in the Easter story, beginning with Jesus receiving the death sentence and ending with the placing of his body in the tomb.

Long a source of devotional visual art, they are equally well-suited to musical representations - with Liszt, Dupré, Paweł Łukaszewski and others all writing works in response to the sequence.

I spoke to harpist Parker Ramsay and composer Nico Muhly to find out more about this genre-defying, highly adaptable hybrid work.

PR: You mention having started to think about a new solo work after recording Bach in King’s Chapel. Keeping a direct connection to the building steered you away from conventional approaches such as a concerto or a sonata. Why was that connection so key for you?

I think the key connection is the fact that King’s College, Cambridge is principally a house of worship, and one that specialises in presenting sacred music. I really felt that in order for a harp solo work – or any non-organ instrumental work – to work in the building, it would need to have a reason to be performed there.

PR: With so many potential sources of inspiration for a sacred-inspired work, why did you settle on the Stations of the Cross?

There are two BIG stories in the Christian faith: Christ’s birth and Christ’s death.

There is a LOT of fantastic Christmas music for the harp. Britten’s Ceremony of Carols is a Nine Lessons and Carols turned upside down. (The carol Adam Lay Ybounden always comes first at Nine Lessons and Carols, but comes right at the end of Britten’s cycle.) There’s also the Dancing Day Cycle by John Rutter.

As such, Lenten/Holy Week theme was needed. And to be honest, I wondered what it would be like to commission a Lenten counterpart to Britten’s Ceremony, as harpists haven’t got a lot to play in the weeks just before Easter. And so I pitched the idea to Nico that maybe something could be done with the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Parker Ramsay performs Veronica wipes the face of Jesus in King's College Chapel.

NM: As Parker notes, this is a work that “straddles the boundaries between oratorio and liturgy”. What sort of contexts do you envisage it being performed in?

One of the most wonderful things about the world in which we live is that sacred and secular music can happily coëxist. I’d make the argument that more people hear Bach cantatas in concert than in the context of worship; then, of course, there are pieces of music we would never hear in concert — I can’t imagine George Dyson’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D appearing on a concert stage near you anytime soon. The Street, by design, is at home in church, but can happily travel to concert halls, private homes, video...

Obviously, it was composed for a hyper-specific one (which is to say, King’s College Cambridge on Holy Saturday), but it’s designed to be flexible. You can do it without the plainchant, you can do it with twelve singers or none, you can do it with Alice’s texts printed, or read out — or just as a solo harp concert piece. I like the idea that it could pop up a few times a year in various situations…

NM: You’ve used three recurring musical motifs throughout the work, named The Cross, The Hands and Holding – how do these bind the movements together?

Motivic development in my work is not as sophisticated as you might find in Wagner; I treat these motifs more as you find in Messiaen, where they appear usually As Themselves. These three motifs, however, start to become more plastic in the last four movements, where one is played at the same time as another, or one turns into another, or one abuts another in a violent and surprising way. The idea wasn’t to do something clever so much as establish these totemic objects onto which the ear can latch through the fourteen movements.

The way these motifs work is quite simple. The Cross motif is three chords based on two nested descending seconds, which has musico-theological grandparents but also is a great way to force myself into a different harmonic space. The Hands motif is about simple work: it’s completely diatonic, unaffected and gentle. Alice’s texts describe, often, a contrast between the giant story being told and the simple craft and shapes of the passion: two pieces of wood, a few pieces of metal, the work of four hands shrouding a body. Holding is more a rhythm than anything else: it’s a berceuse, a cradle song, which draws Mary into the music more, and which reminds us of something perhaps barely remembered: a folk song or a distant fragment of something.

Selections from The Street will be performed on the Camac Harps YouTube channel on January 26th 2023.