Maria Kõrvits – I Am Calling To You (World Première)

by 5:4

Nestling behind today’s Advent Calendar door is one of the most remarkable choral works i’ve ever heard, and one that nicely continues the “I am” reflections from yesterday. I Am Calling to You by Maria Kõrvits is a piece for male choir setting a text that, while some attribute to the 12th century Sufi poet Ibn ʿArabī, may well actually be anonymous (it’s listed as such in Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s 1995 book Travelling the Path of Love). i struggled to put into words my experience of the first performance, and six years later it doesn’t feel much easier.

As the title suggests, the words bespeak a deep, profound longing, one that’s open to all kinds of interpretations. The source of that longing is distant, in terms of both space (“from afar”) and time (“across millennia”), and intimate (“part of your being … that in you which has been always”). As i wrote previously, it brings to mind “the voice of the universe itself, or a divine presence, a kindred spirit or an admirer from afar, or closer still, a subconscious vocation or a repressed desire”. All of these are latent possibilities in the text, depending on the place from which the listener approaches them.

Kõrvits presents the words with utmost care, managing to make them both severe and compassionate at the same time. In the same way as the text, her music is lofty and immense, yet often carrying the gentleness of a caress. Many phrases throughout the piece exhibit a tendency to swell and recede, lending them the quality of extended breaths in and out. This dynamic flexing is channelled through a mixture of sung notes and whispers, and this is especially palpable in the first few minutes, where their use indicates that the “calling” is by no means about mere loudness, encompassing something as slight and delicate as a puff of air. Harmonically, the music is mobile, roaming between fundamentals, in the process opening out from dronal focal points to triads – sometimes blurring major and minor – and altogether more rich and complex chords.

That being said, it’s principally a melodic piece, one that carries connotations of a smeary kind of chant, and which is prepared to descend into abyssal depths as an integral part of its mode of expression. Kõrvits makes the few instances of our own words in response (4:26, 4:59, 7:26) subtly sharp, confused or angular, later answering them (7:53) with the most grave, intensely solemn response: “Where will you run? Just tell me.” The way the music slips in and out of resolution is electrifying, all the more so as these cadence points never remotely feel like the end of the story, partly due to their ‘imperfect’ makeup – such as the dark G-flat chord ending the word “yourself” near the end (8:53), coloured by a tritone – and partly because of this large-scale waxing and waning, which doesn’t so much suggest it could carry on forever, but seems to exist outside time entirely.

It’s a ravishingly beautiful, radically individual approach to words that will no doubt mean something entirely different to each and every person who hears them. The world première was given by the Estonian National Male Choir conducted by Mikk Üleoja.


Text

[bracketed words omitted]

I am calling to you from afar;
Calling to you
since the very beginning of days.
Calling to you across millennia,
For aeons of time,
Calling, calling.
Since always.
It is part of your being, my voice,
But it comes to you faintly
and you only hear it sometimes;
“I don’t know,” (you may say).
But somewhere you know.
“I can’t hear,” (you say),
“what is it and where?”
But somewhere you hear,
and deep down you know.
For I am that in you
which has been always;
I am that in you which will never end.
Even if you say, “Who is calling?”
(Even if you think), “Who is that?”
Where will you run? Just tell me.
Can you run away from yourself?
For I am the Only One for you;
(There is no other,
Your Promise, your Reward
am I alone,
Your Punishment, your longing
And your Goal.)

—Anonymous

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Ennid

How very beautiful! I have been reading and pondering “I Am Calling” since first reading it in 1994, in The Call & The Echo, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. I was reading the verse again in mid-December and thought to search on-line to see if I could find the name of the author. The first to appear was this piece written by you, and the link to the video of the Estonian Male Choral group. I was so amazed in listening, and played it through three times. With love and appreciation!

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