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About VII - Names Of Things I Once Believed
VII - Names Of Things I Once Believed is a Classical song with a duration of 7 minutes and 23 seconds.
Originally released on 6/24/2022, this song
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Aaron Helgeson
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Description
PERFORMED BY:
The Crossing
ABOUT:
The Book of Never lasts two thirds of an hour. But it took one thousand years to make.
It begins with the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the Ukrainian village of Novgorod, sent to convert the town from Paganism to Orthodox Christianity. But when word of Isaakiy’s use of Pagan ritual reached the church elite, he and the entire village were excommunicated for heresy. Through destruction of sacred icons, texts, and writing tools, this meant a complete erasure of any written records of Novgorod, its language, and its religion.
And so, Isaakiy set out to save the collective memory of Novgorod. Over the psalms carved into his wooden pages he poured dozens of wax layers, marking each with text, making birch rubbings of the words he was attempting to preserve — his dualistic prayers, the first written instances of the Rus’ alphabet, sarcastic and scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. Isaakiy’s paper rubbings are lost to the decay of time, but scratches on the wood and wax remain.
There they stayed until the year 2000 (exactly one millennium later) when archaeologists unearthed them perfectly preserved in the mud underneath Novgorod, with thousands of tiny glyphs scratched into a mass of hardened and broken wax. The codex was quickly taken to the world’s foremost Slavonic linguist, Andrei Zaliznyak, who meticulously parsed through the overlapped writing to find letters, then words, then phrases. The resulting text is somewhere between liturgy, the chanting of a vindictive spell, a recitation of sins, and a grammar lesson.
The Book of Never freely combines English translations from the Novgorod Codex with fragments by twentieth century writers in various states of exile:
• Oscar Wilde’s bitter letter to his lover Alfred Douglas written while imprisoned for his homosexuality
• The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street recorded by the band in France while avoiding tax debt
• Socialist and Chilean expat Pablo Neruda’s epic history of the Americas in Cantos General
• An interview with philosopher and black rights activist Angela Davis after her release from the Marin County Women’s Detention Facility
• The poetry of musician and holocaust survivor Andre Singer after fleeing to the United States
• Thanhhà Lại’s autobiographical verse novel Inside Out and Back Again about the young daughter of a Vietnamese refugee family growing up in Alabama
• Gertrude Stein’s prose poem Descriptions of Literature built from cryptic one-sentence descriptions of books in the library she shared with her romantic partner Alice B. Toklas
The melodies and chords in The Book of Never were constructed prior to laying in the text and made solely of densely collaged hymns (only a few notes each) from the Stichera Alphabetica, sung in association with the psalms of the Novgorod Codex’s wooden tablets. The first letters of these hymns spell out the alphabet, echoing sequences found in the codex. These are layered on top of one another, juxtaposed, and harmonized with dense clusters built by simulating extremely long reverberations in digitally engineered virtual spaces.
The long story of The Book of Never has an uncanny epitaph. I began writing this music on December 24, 2017 during a particularly snowy and silent day in Chicago. That same day, halfway around the world in Ukraine, Andrei Zaliznyak died before he could complete his work transcribing the Novgorod Codex. It was a haunting synchronicity, one that I would only learn of two years later. I had hoped to contact Zaliznyak. To commune with him on the codex’s origin, it’s text, and its historical revelations. But maybe it’s best I didn’t. Best that I never fully knew what meaning I’d unearthed. That some secrets remain buried in the mud. To be discovered again. One thousand years from now.
