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Refuge was written for Peter Slowik and the Deus Ex Musica Project. The piece is a meditation on Psalm 46 and the title comes from the Psalm’s opening line: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” Refuge borrows melodic material from another work I wrote called Kairos, for reed quintet, which is influenced by Byzantine chant. In meditating on this Psalm, I was drawn again to the sonic aesthetic principle of cathedrals: resonance. In cathedrals, resonating the space is an attempt to sonically connect with something massive, something larger than ourselves—the Infinite—with God. The 6th-century poet Paul the Silentiary describes it this way: “human action…brings into presence the divine reaction, the divine voice…in a sense that is the reverberation of the space: After the human voice stops singing, the building continues.”[1] I use the viola’s open strings and natural harmonics extensively to make the instrument resonate as much as possible, hopefully creating the illusion that the melody is ringing in a large cathedral-like space, regardless of where the piece is performed. And it is in this resonance—the liminal space between sound and silence—where I find this line from the Psalm: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Psalm 46

¹ God is our refuge and strength,
    an ever-present help in trouble.
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
    and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
³ though its waters roar and foam
    and the mountains quake with their surging.

⁴ There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
    the holy place where the Most High dwells.
⁵ God is within her, she will not fall;
    God will help her at break of day.
⁶ Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
    he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

⁷ The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.

⁸ Come and see what the Lord has done,
    the desolations he has brought on the earth.
⁹ He makes wars cease
    to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
    he burns the shieldswith fire.
¹⁰ He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”

¹¹ The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.

(New International Version)

[1] New York Times, August 6, 2020, “How a Historian Stuffed Hagia Sophia’s Sound Into a Studio”