The Esoterics

The Esoterics' recording sessions for our April INTIMAS series were a great success, and we are excited to announce that a CD of this repertoire should be available later this summer. In the four movements of his 2007 song cycle, Messages to myself, Christopher Theofanidis has given voice to verses by Rumi, Whitman, Yeats, and Amy Beth Kirsten. These words inspired Theofanidis to create a series of meditations on various aspects of community: from finding one’s own voice and hearing the voice of others, to the benefits of critical thinking, loving one’s neighbor, and the interdependence of our collective humanity. In The wheel of time, the dance (2014), Aaron Jay Kernis chose to set four poems by the environmental activist and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry. After departing the initial bustle of the city, Berry’s verses pay homage to the cycles found in time and nature, life and love, with images of light and darkness, field and forest, land and air, water and weather. For Kernis, the wheel of time allows for “the sweet enclosure of the song,” and inspires an eternal dance with everyone – our families, friends, neighbors, and departed ancestors. Through this dance, we gain an emotional connection to our own geography and genealogy, and even after losing ourselves, we are still able to find our own way home. This disc will conclude with Eric Banks’ a cappella choral symphony, This delicate universe (2015), Banks’ 32-minute works sets poems by the Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy that explore five different “universes,” or meditations on connectedness: the sharing of one’s art, the familiar comfort of one’s neighborhood, the inextricable link between place and memory, the most intimate interaction between lovers, and the mystical, spiritual embrace of the great unknown, in “the sacred silence of creation.”