A Mere Breath
ensemble violin and tape
written winter 2021
duration 6 minutes
Commissioned by Deus Ex Musica as a winner in their 2020 Composition Competition
The Psalms have always held a great degree of significance to me, both as a Christian and as an artist. Much has been written about their beautiful composition and their timeless imagery, but beyond the Psalms’ considerable literary beauty and their theological profundity, I have always been drawn in by their honesty. For such early literature, these songs are remarkable for their frank depictions of their respective authors’ emotional states, whether ecstatic joy (as in Psalm 126), deep contrition (Psalm 51), assured hope (Psalm 23), or meditative ponderance (Psalm 39). The emotional nakedness of the Psalms always reminds me of God’s pursuit of our hearts: He would know us in our truest selves, rather than our constructed, ‘religious’ selves. It was with this posture that I began to write A Mere Breath, a reflection on Psalm 39.
Psalm 39 feels uniquely ahead of its time, prefiguring the book of Ecclesiastes with its existential themes of ephemerality and uncertainty. Its surprising emotional complexity is perhaps what has made it so enduringly appealing, appearing in pieces from Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem to Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. I found myself identifying with the Psalm thanks in no small part to the time in which I had begun writing my piece: as the world continued to square off against the Covid-19 pandemic, I was applying to more school and was not altogether sure where I would be the next year. I identified with the Psalm’s thinly veiled frustration and confusion that stemmed from recognizing the sheer smallness of humanity in the face of an eternal God.
A Mere Breath casts the violinist as psalmist, contending with the depths and scale of the eternal. Wispy and capricious, the violin part gradually unfolds the piece’s main theme, a plaintive, Hildegard-like hymn of simple beauty. Pursuing it across a variety of figurations, the soloist eventually takes hold of the melody with relief, swells in thanksgiving, and ultimately vanishes into nothingness.