By Mike Romero
Provo-based, award-winning composer Andrew Maxfield was living in Boston in 2007 when he bought a copy of the classic philosophical text, the Tao Te Ching (which translates from Chinese to English as Book of the Way).
“I spent my commute time reading,” he explains. “And for whatever reason, I was on a philosophy kick at the time.” As he read, he fell in love with the 81 short chapters of the Tao (pronounced “Dow”), which read like proverbs. Take this gem, for example:
Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease.
“As a choral and vocal composer, I have this weird habit of looking at nearly everything I read as potential musical source material,” Maxfield says. But the various translations of the Tao that he read, while fascinating, didn’t seem particularly singable—but the idea of making a Tao-inspired piece had begun to germinate.
Eventually, Maxfield connected with Jane English, a Vermont-based photographer and writer, and one of the co-translators (with the late Gia-Fu Feng) of a popular edition of the Tao Te Ching. In their conversations, English emphasized that “playfulness” is a sometimes-overlooked quality in the letter and spirit of the text, and she encouraged Maxfield to “play” with the text.
“This was strange advice, since so many authors are protective of their words,” says Maxfield. “But since the translations I had read were so unyielding, musically, I ultimately took Jane’s advice and I wrote my own ‘lyrical riffs’ on the Tao, and began to use those as the basis of a new choral-instrumental work.”
Maxfield wasn’t a stranger to working with words as well as music. By that point, he had written the texts for a handful of his own choral works, and, to date, has published poetry and essays and collaborated with other songwriters and composers as a lyricist. However, the scope of this writing was new. “I was concerned about writing both text and music since that’s the exception, rather than the rule, in choral music,” he said. “But, at a certain point, the idea kept tugging at me and I responded—both as a lyricist-librettist and as a composer.” He began working on texts in 2017.
Book of the Way—a new concert-length, genre-bending work for choir and chamber ensemble —combines Maxfield’s passion for Renaissance vocal music and jazz harmonic language as it explores key ideas from the Tao Te Ching.
“It’s definitely unlike anything else in the choral space that I know of,” says Kameron Kavanaugh, the Artistic Director of Sound of Ages, the vocal ensemble that will premiere Maxfield’s Book of the Way in two performances. “We’ve done a lot of Andrew’s music, so I’m used to his musical language, which usually has this ‘ancient-meets-modern’ vibe. But I wasn’t expecting a jazz-influenced band to join the choir.”
Maxfield describes hearing jazz drummer Brian Blade at the Village Vanguard in New York City as a turning point. “I was in New York for a premiere of some of my choral music, and I made a pilgrimage to the Vanguard to hear my favorite drummer, Brian Blade, play with the Fellowship Band,” Maxfield explains. “Blade has this sort of transcendent time-feel in his playing, and when I heard that performance, I sort of knew that something like it needed to be the heartbeat of my Tao piece.”
Book of the Way is certainly ambitious, with its combination of a 16-voice choir and an 11-person chamber orchestra. It premieres in two performances in November as part of the Sound of Ages concert season.
The first performance is Monday, November 6, at 7:30 PM in the Thompson Recital Hall at the University of Utah School of Music. The next night, November 7, the group will perform at 7:30 PM at the Springville Museum of Art. Tickets are on sale now. You can hear The Sound of Ages choir below.