A Parable for End Times
for choir & orchestra (2018)
3(picc).2.3(bcl).2 / 4.3.3.1 / timp + 3perc / hp / pno(cel) / strings / choir (SATB)
15 minutes
Commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Performed by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Horizon choir, Alexander Mickelthwate conducting | Winnipeg New Music Festival – Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg, MB.
Score and parts available for rental (PDF or hard copy). Send an inquiry through the
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A Parable for End Times is a setting of an excerpt from Canadian author Steven Erikson’s novella “The Devil Delivered”. The story depicts a near-future Earth ravaged by nuclear fallout, depleted natural resources, and an ozone hole the size of the Great Plains. In this dystopia, a young boy’s painfully naive question – “what did I do wrong” – is met with a scathing diatribe on humanity’s complicity in its own planet’s destruction, resulting from a myopic preoccupation with ephemeral comforts and exploitative indulgence.
This piece is my response to how timely and prescient Erikson’s words feel in the current cultural landscape.
What did I do wrong?
You were born, son, with the added misfortune of surviving it. You were new and helpless and you trusted — my, how you trusted. You never learned the lessons of withholding that trust, of relying upon your judgments, of mastering healthy skepticism. Your gods took you in hand and led you into Hell. Regular folk, the kind that hosted parties, backyard barbecues, but to you they were gods, and like God Himself they laid a judgment upon you, that you should suffer, that you should know the anguish of a guilt you never earned. They gave you life, and you lived their definition of it.
It's a parable, in its own way. Analogous to the horror visited upon the sons and daughters by the fathers and mothers. They give you life: a world poisoned, its earth blasted and ripped open and breeding deadly diseases, its waters turgid and tossed with dead creatures, its air foul with invisible gases and holed like gauze letting the rays burn down the holy message of cancer and blindness.
We needed those cars, son, to speed up our pursuit of unachievable and unworthy dreams. We needed those forests stripped away, to plant food to feed our weeping multitudes. We needed that plastic that gave you tits and made you infertile. We needed those antibiotics, those televisions and their vital programming, those bloodless cameras that never blinked nor turned away. We needed all those wars to feed our technocratic utopia. We needed those prison ships, we needed segregation, calling in those bank loans, national lotteries, millionaire athletes, movie stars, white hoods and burning crosses, doctors gunned down outside abortion clinics, walled neighborhoods with private armies, pedophiles, serial killers, terrorists, fundamentalists — we needed all those things, son, and you will, too. They're our gift to you, given out of love because we tried to better your lives. At least, that's what we kept telling each other. Can't you see how much better we've made your lives?
Text excerpted from "The Devil Delivered" by Steven Erikson, used and reprinted with permission of the author. Copyright ©2005, Steven Erikson.
World & Canadian premiere:
• January 27, 2018 | Winnipeg New Music Festival | Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Horizon choir | Alexander Mickelthwate, conductor; Johanna Hildebrand, choral director
