The Crossing: Titration
Navona Records

Composer Shara Nova and the Donald Nally-led The Crossing benefit from their mutual association on Titration, the Grammy Award-winning choir's thirtieth album. She's made a considerable name for herself as the founder of the chamber pop group My Brightest Diamond and her involvement in a number of noteworthy projects but reaps significant rewards in having the esteemed vocal ensemble devote an entire album to her artistry. The Crossing, on the other hand, benefits in having been given terrific new material to work with, an imaginative and provocative song cycle by one of the contributors to its recent Carols After a Plague album.

Having appeared in these pages many times, The Crossing needs little introduction. The recipient of three Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance and eight Grammy nominations in total, the ensemble has received numerous other honours and collaborated with some of the globe's most outstanding artists; it has also created a discography that by any standard is remarkable and adventurous. While, as mentioned, Nova's known to many for My Brightest Diamond, she's been involved in a great many other projects. She studied classical voice at The University of North Texas and has composed pieces for fellow forward-thinkers such as yMusic, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Nordic Voices, Brooklyn Rider, and Roomful of Teeth. She's written a number of daring vocal-oriented works, a recent example Infinite Movement, created with visual artist Matthew Ritchie and scored for double choir, double brass ensembles, and featured soloists. She doesn't sing on Titration but has done so on projects by Sarah Kirkland Snider, David Lang, David Byrne, Steve Mackey, Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney, and others.

Premiered at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana in August 2022 and recorded that same month at St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley in Malvern, Pennsylvania, the fifty-two-minute Titration augments the ensemble with contributions from sound designer Paul Vazquez and keyboardists John Grecia, John Conahan, and John Walthausen (a bit of triangle and glockenspiel also appears). Titration conceptually has to do with the way one's feelings and body are integrated through therapy, albeit slowly so as to avoid distress or re-traumatization. For Titration as a choral song cycle, Nova draws upon various healing modalities to explore different ways by which to address that process and to consider the question directly posed in one of the tracks, “How do I keep on feelin' in this mean, mean world?” To that end, a multiplicity of vocal techniques are utilized, including humming, spitting, grunts, chants, and, perhaps most strikingly, laughter. Ancient (Qi-Gong) and recent (Laughter Yoga) practices are call upon in the work, its seventeen sections held together by the presence of three “Titration” vignettes. The work isn't overtly political, though Nova does dedicate the declamatory “Patterns of Protection” to the twenty-one people murdered in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting.

Opening with a Moonbeams-like flourish, the work arrests from the moment “Freeze State” uses shivering and hushed utterances to convey the protagonist's fear and uncertainty. Humming's deployed in “Safety in Peril or Clam” to reinstate feelings of calm and inner balance. Designed to inspire and bolster commitment, items of self-direction are catalogued in “I Seek to Change These Habits.” Dedicated to those who have lost loves ones by suicide, the work's centrepiece “The Grief of Which I Rarely Speak” is suitably plaintive in its expression of yearning (“I look for you in the blowing grass / I search for your cloud in my teacup …”); a less harrowing kind of longing receives expression in the somewhat Proustian meditation “Imagine a Favorite Place.” Vocal accents reminiscent of Anderson's “O Superman” surface in “What's the Vibe, Vagus?,” “Turn Ya Head,” and other parts. Whereas repetition of the titular words in “Yes / No” make for some Reich-styled moments, “I'm So Mad I Could Spit Nails” flirts with gospel.

June 2023