Written, produced and voiced by Jabez L. Van Cleef
Influences
This work is inspired by personal visits to Nazi concentration camps and a desire to take meaningful art action to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again.
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We seek to find and present music and experimental dramatic work that promotes a collective consciousness and values of peace and understanding throughout the world.
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THE PALIMPSEST OF HUMAN RIGHTS:
is a simultaneously voiced adaptation of the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Samples of Van Cleef’s PALIMPSEST are also available on purevolume.com under the artist name PALIMPSEST. To go there, click here:
PALIMPSEST on PUREVOLUME.COM
You can also hear Van Cleef’s Spirit Song Text verse gospels on iSound.com.
SPIRIT SONG TEXT on iSound.com
The full texts to all four verse gospels are also available for downloading from theworshipwell.org, a resource site of the Episcopal Church USA. You can access the files through this link (look under "Fresh Liturgical Texts" in the "Word" section):
Spirit Song Text (Jabez Van Cleef) on The Worship Well.org
Experimental alternative music by Van Cleef is also recorded under the artist name THE CHURCH OF THE SENTIENT MACHINE. Click on this box to go see:
CSM on PUREVOLUME.COM
Also, if you want to hear HARMONIUM, a choral society affiliated with PALIMPSEST, then click on this box:
HARMONIUM on PUREVOLUME.COM
ABOUT THE PALIMPSEST
For those who have never heard the word palimpsest: before printing was invented, monks in the Middle Ages would copy texts onto sheets of parchment, stretched sheepskin. If they ran out of new parchment, the scribes would keep copying on the sheets they had already used, writing on top of what was already written. Repeated overwritings created documents called palimpsests that may have been mostly illegible but that nevertheless came to symbolize the doggedness and devotion of the scribes.
The physical palimpsest is here extended to an aural experience. The work is an aural palimpsest because when it is read aloud it encodes some part of the utterance of each reader, while concealing some part of the others. It is defined partly by what is retained from the earlier statement, not entirely by what is intended or heard of the latter. Just as the mind of the reader struggles to decipher what is underneath, the ear of the listener works harder to discern the meaning of the intentionally obscured speech.
Here is how the palimpsest was written: from various sources Van Cleef assembled prose writings of Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and Henry Thoreau. He adapted these prose source materials into a common format by paraphrasing the text into metered lines (iambic pentameter), once again tailoring the length of each thread to match the others. He took the three parallel documents and, placing them side by side on the computer screen, inserted alternating lines from each source, to create three-line stanzas in a single unified master document· The result is a long poem in which the successive lines are bound rhythmically but not always by meaning. In each stanza the first line is from Thoreau, the second line from Gandhi, and the third line from King.
It should be clear that this is an esthetic experience that draws on both choral singing and the spoken word. The purpose of text weaving, which is the underlying force behind this effort, is to allow an expression of the text which is simultaneously individual and collective.
God is in three persons. Whenever three persons are gathered together in the name of God, God is there. The three persons who wrote this text did not live in the same place or at the same time, but now they are together. They are together in the mind of God, and they are together in your hand and your eye as you look here.
/June, 2006/
Jabez L. Van Cleef/
aka /palimpsest/ spirit song text
