Still Waters

for solo cello

When Diana Reid requested a piece based on Psalm 23, I jumped at the chance to write for my friend and weekly Mass “bandmate”. 

Psalm 23 articulates the central peace of faith: God provides a quiet refuge from all the world’s strife. I quickly found a set of opening chords to reflect the mystery and surrender I experience in my own faith. And then I got stuck. I had all kinds of musical ideas for the material, but it was drifting further and further from the Psalm. 

I spent two months away from my chords. In that time, I read Thorns of the Mesquite by my friend and collaborator Patricia Lee Lewis. Psalm 23 appears at a climatic scene in the novel, when Donna Rose Willis recites it from her own “valley of the shadow of death.” It is both a prayer to God and a petition to all humanity to remember their better angels. This moment opened my eyes to the true power of the Psalm beyond its poetic beauty. 

When it finally came time to revisit my chords, I found a crucial ingredient to develop the piece while honoring the essential tone of the Psalm: Gregorian Psalm Tones. I owe special thanks to Professor Steven Plank for helping me understand this aesthetic more fully.

 The resulting work is a dialogue between the pensive reflection of the chords and the active pleading of the chanted scripture. The rhythms for the heart of the piece directly set Psalm 23:2-4 and ultimately spill over into folk melody derived from the psalm tone. In this pastoral celebration, the cello’s left hand pizzicato stands in for the harp of David, an image which Professor Plank suggested as inspiration.