Jeffrey Derus: From Wilderness
Navona Records

Jeffrey Derus is both a founding board member of Choral Arts Initiative and one of the esteemed ensemble's tenors. He's also, however, the composer of From Wilderness: A Meditation on the Pacific Coast Rail, a glorious choral work brought to magnificent realization by twenty-five CAI singers (conducted by the company's founder and Artistic Director Brandon Elliott), eight crystal bowl players, and cellist Kevin Mills. The company earlier distinguished itself with its inaugural album, How to Go On: The Choral Works of Dale Trumbore, and now equals that achievement with a stellar realization of Derus's work. While he doesn't sing on the recording, he was, of course, deeply involved in the long process of bringing From Wilderness to physical fruition, a process, incidentally, that was captured in four online videos documenting the project's evolution from inception to completion.

When the original plan for its early 2020 live premiere was derailed by the pandemic, the performers reunited after sixteen months apart at EastWest Studios in Hollywood, California for two days in July 2021 to record it (how fitting that the experience of being together again would be so healing for the singers when the work itself is also, among other things, about healing). From Wilderness isn't the only piece Derus has created, by the way. He's received commissions from a host of ensembles in addition to CAI, including INSPIRARE and Inversion Ensemble. A graduate of California State University and Brandman University, he holds the title of Vocal Music Director at Canyon High School and guides his students through the school's award-winning music program. He couldn't have hoped for a better vocal ensemble to perform the work than the award-winning CAI, which operates out of the Southern California region and has commissioned nineteen compositions and premiered more than seventy works.

The idea for From Wilderness originated, naturally, out of Derus's personal experience when his parents took him and his sisters to many of the places on the Pacific Crest Trail on summer vacations. The immersive experiences he had during those visits became fond memories and a source of inspiration for what would become CAI's first concert-length work. The verdant beauty of the wildernesses one encounters in undertaking the journey northward from Campo, Southern California to Manning Park, British Columbia can't help but be life-changing for the traveler.

It's not a religious work in the literal sense, yet there is a sacred and ritual-like quality to the material, especially when it's structured as it is. Multiple stops along the trail are visited, with the cello a recurring presence. Seven chakras appear intermittently, each a soothing meditation coloured by the time-slowing susurrations of crystal singing bowls. The choral ensemble sings as a whole, but individual singers are granted spotlights too. Derus carefully selected texts by a number of poets for the work, among them William Blake, Hilda Doolittle, Kate Chopin, William Wordsworth, Marjorie Allen Seiffert, Carl Sandburg, Nora Ghassan Abdullatif, and even Derus himself.

The meditative lure of the material is immediately in place when the work begins with the reverberant chime of the singing bowls and follows it with the one-two punch of Mills's lyrical cello and the CAI's harmonies. With the question “When will you begin that long journey into yourself?” posed throughout the opening part, the introduction acts as both invocation and invitation. In the twenty-seven sections that follow, the work oscillates between engulfing and introspective vocal episodes, the journey punctuated by gentle singing bowl interludes.

The singers acquit themselves marvelously, and the stirring effect when their voices soar is certainly one of the project's most memorable aspects (hear, for instance, their delivery of Archibald Lampman's words “the hurrying centres of the storm unite” in “Northern California: No 2 Belden”). During the seven Oregon sections, individual singers are called upon to sing texts by Sandburg, with the closing pair in the series memorable for bringing four of the soloists together. The tone of the musical writing naturally dovetails with the character of the texts; during one Sierras section, for example, the singers intone words by John Muir, “How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! / To behold this alone is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over,” their rapturous delivery consistent with the poet's humble recognition of the setting's beauty.

June 2022