The Crossing: A Native Hill
Navona Records

The Crossing brings its consummate vocal artistry to Gavin Bryars' A Native Hill, the prolific chamber choir's twenty-fourth commercial album and its sequel to the English composer's The Fifth Century, which won the Donald Nally-led ensemble its first Grammy Award in 2018. Born in 1943, Bryars is long removed from his days as an improvising jazz bassist with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, and the well-known early pieces The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet likewise seem like the work of a rather different composer from today's vantage point. A thorough examination of his output does reveal a clear through-line, however, from those experimental works to the refined chamber music, concertos, and vocal works of recent years.

His is a subtle art, as shown by A Native Hill, a twelve-part a cappella work written as a gift for The Crossing. Bryars dedicated it to his granddaughter Cassia Bryars-Rockey and to the memory of her father Julian Rockey, whose sudden passing during the writing of the work influenced its tone. Its contemplative character is borne out by a Nally comment: “Gavin's music inspires us to stop, listen, and ponder. It is less a call to action than an invitation to remember again the beauty of the natural world and the life available to those who listen to that world.”

Key to the work is, naturally, the text Bryars selected for it, in this case the 1968 essay “A Native Hill” by American writer Wendell Berry (b. 1934). His meditations on rural life and the spiritual reward that comes from deep immersion in nature and its seasonal rhythms find their perfect match in the composer. The work's reflective tone is conveyed at the outset when the unnamed narrator states, “But the sense of the past also gives a deep richness and resonance to nearly everything I see here” and that he thinks “of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the comings and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are put down.”

The relationship Bryars established with The Crossing for The Fifth Century enabled him to write with particular voices in mind, and consistent with that two of the movements feature solo parts. For the most part, however, the music is characterized by the wondrous sound of luminous male and female voices intertwining. While the voices rise to exultant heights in certain passages, much of A Native Hill is delivered at a controlled hush that amplifies the choir's silken harmonies and vocal textures and reinforces an overall mood of serenity.

Whereas the narrator's attunement to nature's elemental rhythms is evident in “The Music of Streams” (“There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all.”), the reverence with which the earth is regarded illuminates the seventh movement “Questions” (“And so my questions do not aspire beyond the earth. They aspire toward it and into it.”) plus the eighth “Topsoil.” Bryars repeatedly fashions the music in accordance with the text. In “Sea Level,” for instance, the voices rise majestically as they sing “The arable ridgetops reach out above the gathered trees like headlands into the sea, …,” and one comes away from the project convinced that only with a close monitoring of the text and music together can A Native Hill be truly appreciated.

June 2021