I. this

i. this / that

ii. north / star

iii. love / is

II. sidetrack A

III. that

i. tiger / rhino

ii. planted / here

iii. war / horses

iv. any / price

IV. sidetrack B

V. choose

i. ravel / unravel

ii. go / don't

iii. this

Orchestration

Clarinet

Bass Clarinet

Tenor Saxophone

Piano

Electric Piano

Electric Guitar

Vibraphone

Drumset

Sub-Chorus

Chorus

Violin I

Violin II

Viola

Cello

Bass

“I bought my copy of Tao Te Ching (which translates to Book of the Way) back in December of 2007, when I was living in Boston for the first time. I guess I’m the type of person who reads deep books for fun, and so it seemed pretty natural to spend my commuter time on the Red Line train reading the 81 micro chapters of Eastern philosophy that make up the Tao (pronounced ‘Dow’). You could probably argue that it would be a little more normal just to listen to Red Sox games…

In any case, I felt like these holistic and quiet Eastern ideas were a useful counterpoint (and complement) to the Western ideas with which I had grown up. As I read, the composer part of me wanted to respond to the texts and ideas too, but the translations I read didn’t seem very singable or inherently musical. By 2017, though, I had created my own index of key ideas in the Tao and had begun writing my own ‘lyrical riffs’ or ‘responses’ to the source material. And by 2021, I had, finally, settled on the idea of writing a ‘big’ work that is based on a person encountering the Tao, rather than a setting of exact, actual translated passages of the source.

One reason for writing a ‘big’ piece (rather than a standalone choral octavo or cycle) is that the ideas in the Tao, while packaged in pithy, small containers, are really big. Like existentially big, particularly as we see how human nature plays out in the post-Industrial Revolution world. I wanted to create a work that would hold people in a longer span of time and create a reflective, immersive experience with both the music and the key ideas of the Tao. It’s a little like how Mark Rothko painted his color fields on such large canvases and hoped that the viewers would stand close enough to not be aware of the edges of the artwork, to get completely into the experience of the color itself.”

- Andrew Maxfield