Ubi Sunt
for women’s choir, vibraphone, harp, and strings (2008)
Text by Eliana Chilakos
Conducted by Michal Novotny.
Recorded by Jeremy Tusz on November 21, 2009 at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal (live recording)
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Ubi Sunt is a modern sonnet by the Montreal-based writer, Eliana Chilakos. Her poem is based on the anonymous medieval poem, The Wanderer, which scholars date back to anywhere between the 6th and 11th centuries C.E. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior, his present hardships, and his religious faith. Eliana Chilakos’s take on this iconic work is spoken clearly through a woman’s voice – a longing and idealization of this Wanderer character’s nobility, his introspection, his quest for meaning.
The term ‘ubi sunt...’ is a reference to a literary motif. Short for “ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?” (“where are those who were before us?”), the phrase begins many medieval poems and announces a theme of nostalgia, a longing for ‘the good old days’ or ‘the golden years’.
My composition on Ubi Sunt begins with an arpeggio figure that combines two clashing harmonies: C# minor and D minor. It is first presented in the vibraphone and immediately imitated by the harp. These instruments represent the cold, wintry forest through which both the poet (Chilakos) and the Wanderer travel; their coldly metallic resonance of these instruments help to depict snow, ice, a sharp wind, dead trees. The Wanderer character (the narrative voice in the eponymous poem) then makes his entrance, represented by the solo cello with a stolid, wandering whole-tone theme that is identified with the key of C# minor. The theme appears in complete form twice in the piece (at different pitch levels), but motives extracted from it permeate the work. Soon, like a cold gust of wind, the women’s choir fades in and out, announcing the presence of another mind: the Poet’s voice. As the introduction comes to an end, the first line of text (“While empty streets have been a longest friend”) is heard in a slowly rising, chromatic theme identifying with the key of D minor. This – the Poet’s – theme is related to the Wanderer’s (solo cello) through common motives that have been altered into a new identity. Throughout the piece, we hear the Poet’s and Wanderer’s themes mingling and hinting at each other, their dissonant harmonic relationship clashing as a 21st-century woman tries to reconcile her worldview with that of a medieval man. Their identifying harmonies (respectively D minor and C# minor) become juxtaposed, superimposed, and interleaved in various ways until they come together at the end of the piece in a painfully insistent climax.
The world premiere was given by the Lorelei Ensemble with Beth Willer conducting at the Brookline Parish in Brookline, MA (USA) on May 3rd, 2008.
This recording is from the Canadian premiere, given on November 21, 2009, at Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal. It was conducted by Michal Novotny and features soloists Ellen Gibling (harp), Amie Watson (vibraphone), and Eli Weinberger (cello), with voices and strings from McGill University.
The piece is dedicated to the memory of Peter Chilakos (1938-2007); a wonderful man, he is greatly missed.
Ubi Sunt by Eliana Chilakos
While empty streets have been a longest friend,
Their silence never fooled me when they said:
The road to wonder has one tragic end;
But longing for darkness, I moved ahead.
My journey took me far to banished lands,
Where I searched for a time lost and now part
Of a desolate shore and stretched out sands;
And still he reigns inside my lonesome heart,
This man I love whose steps I cannot trace,
Whose face I never saw but virtue always felt;
And though the world his memory erase,
A warrior’s weary spirit does not melt
Like specks of snow, but outlives the barren cold,
Becoming in wisdom a thousand winters old.
