Earlier this year on Holy Saturday, harpist Parker Ramsay performed the world premiere of The Street, a series of meditations by Nico Muhly and Alice Goodman. Commissioned by King’s College, Cambridge, the performance also included plainchant sung by their choir, and his now available on the Choir’s own label. Mark Seow, who attended the premiere, talks to the composer about what it is like to write for harp.

It’s a wonder how the chapel floor was not covered in blood. Such was the piercing pluck of Parker Ramsay’s harp at the work’s premiere on Holy Saturday 2022. For some movements, the harp emerged from the plainchant, dovetailed and vaporous, a seamless unrolling of sonic cloth through the Chapel from narrator to choir to harp. But for the harp’s opening, 'Jesus is condemned to death' (I), the attack was blistering. Unlike the 'Herr, Herr, Herr' from Bach’s St John Passion which slices circulatio strings with breathy, incorporeal vowel, here it was human flesh that ruptured the timeless incense of chant. And with a work constructed on the Stations of the Cross such as The Street, we inevitably listen with a certain kind of knowledge, too. As the composer Nico Muhly told me ahead of the premiere, 'It’s not a secret what happens, he doesn’t hop off the cross and run away'. We know that Jesus will be crucified, that skin will be pierced by nails; we know that He will bleed.

The Street is a set of meditations on the fourteen Stations of the Cross scored for solo harp. Between the harp movements, the choir sings plainchant ranging from Popule meus, the reproaches suppressed by Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century, to O vos omnes from the Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday. Each Station is supported by an original text by Alice Goodman, John Adams’s librettist for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.

'I was obsessed'

When talking about Goodman, Muhly’s sentences blur in adulation. He struggles to find full stops: 'I grew up listening to her words; I was obsessed…As a character she’s loomed large in my…I became a composer…There are works that brought one from I’m-dabbling-in-music to I’m-a-musician—from one side of that to the other—both Nixon and Klinghoffer are part of that raft of information that I think about all the time.'

Muhly describes Goodman’s texts as 'containing clues to how the attendant music might sound'. In the poems were 'sparks' or 'prompts' for each harp movement, and so expectedly there are some mimetic aspects. We hear the 'Doppler effect' made by the mobbing crowd in the harp’s repeated chords, a fortissimo sting that dissipates into yelping. In the movement 'Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross' (V), the harp’s lowest strings are pulled into a wired thwang, a groan of metal that shudders at its own ugly physicality. 'Your cross is the cross of forced labour: your yoke chafes and your burden is as much as you can bear', Goodman writes.

The harp itself is a kind of prompt. 'There’s something so intense about an instrument that is the size of a human being', Muhly tells me. For a work as long as The Street, the harpist is unnaturally called to sustain a strange brace position: a kind of crucifixion in itself.

'You cannot think about it like a piano'

Making his writing idiomatic for harp – the 'finickiest of instruments', sighs Muhly – meant that the commission at times took on an intense mode of collaboration. Muhly recalls the hundreds of texts, emails and voice notes exchanged with Ramsay, as well as Zoom calls in which Ramsay would demonstrate why something did not work on the harp. I’m reminded of the letters and postcards written by Brahms and Joachim as they tinkered away at the Violin Concerto seemingly all the way up until its publication in October 1879, ten months after the work’s premiere. 'Most of it is playable, much of it violinistically quite original', Joachim assured the composer on 24 August 1878. But even in March 1879, Brahms still doubted the Concerto’s worth: 'is the piece really good and practical enough to be published?' Muhly and Ramsay embody a musical friendship cut from the same cloth, albeit electrified by the technology of the 21st century.

The main thing Muhly had to get his head round was the particularities of the harp’s pedals. 'It’s a weird instrument. You cannot think about it like a piano. One of the greatest insults is that if a harpist tells you, well, it’s kinda pianistic, that’s them saying that you have no idea what you’re doing.' The timbre of experience colours Muhly’s words: 'The strangeness of the harp is that it resists complicated chromatic work.'

This limitation is transformed into a blue-stained diatonicism in 'Jesus takes up His cross' (II). For the movement’s opening 16 bars, Muhly composes only in white notes. 'I was trying to write honest music, earnest music … [music that was] like making something with your hands'. I push Muhly further in what he means by this, and we talk about woodwork and pottery, both of us reluctant to pin it down in musical terms. He then has a go: 'What’s not like, what’s the opposite of—'. Muhly finishes his sentence on his MIDI keyboard, playing the ornamental flourish that opens Variation 16 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It’s music with no fuss, apparently, no trace of artifice. Muhly’s chord sequence comprises the raw, untreated materials of C major, assembled in an order for their shape and shine. At the premiere, Ramsay plucked the movement’s harmonies like a carpenter at his workbench: deliberate and careful, measuring chords by their internal resonance.

This handiwork then turns to brutality. For the movement 'Jesus is nailed to the cross' (XI), bare hands are not enough: with a guitar pick in one hand and the soft flesh of the other, Ramsay shears the strings of his harp as if it’s a sheep in Spring. The harp’s trademark – its flamboyant, celestial glissando – is turned into something brittle. With each station, then, Muhly calls the harpist to morph: to make then murder, soothe then sob.

Muhly was tested by the harp’s specific baggage. 'There are certain instruments that are haunted by certain pieces of music. I don’t think we can even think about the harp without thinking about Ceremony of Carols', says Muhly. Britten’s influence, along with Hindemith and Fauré’s, loom large in The Street. Ramsay notes how in the third movement of Hindemith’s Sonata for Harp, the composer set a poem by Ludwig H. C. Hölty as an un-texted melody. Muhly nods to this in 'Jesus falls for the third time' (IX) when a line by Goodman – 'However low I fall, let me not fall far from you' – engenders an unsung melody. It’s a beautiful tune that, in its intervals, somehow sounds like friendship: octaves and perfect fifths open out like caring arms and loving palms.

There are other elephants in the room, too—and what a room. For 'Jesus meets his mother' (IV), the music rocks the baby Jesus to sleep with a Berceuse, and in this cradle-song, for a moment it’s Christmas Eve 1997 as the Fayrfax Carol breathes its way into being. A mode of reference – 'just a little "Hey, Tom Adès!"', Muhly laughs – is, perhaps, inescapable. There’s a sense that all sounds from King’s past and present meet together in the Chapel: they mingle and melt as a vibrational mix to dance on the stained glass.