Raua Needmine (Curse Upon Iron), composed in 1972, is an iconic choral work written by an iconic composer. Veljo Tormis was one of the most prominent creative personalities in Estonian music and rose to international prominence through his choral compositions, which frequently incorporate elements of Estonian folk music and culture. The text of Raua Needmine comes mostly from the Kalevala, a 19th-century compilation of epic Finnish poetry and ancient folklore, which was translated into Estonian and augmented with a bit of modern text for this composition. To deliver the extensive and stark story expressed by the text, the music uses primordial concepts such as incantations and ritualistic drumming, and combines them with modern compositional techniques. One such technique is the imitation of air-raid sirens in the vocal parts, harkening to the bombings of Tallinn during World War II. In the end, the composition follows the advice of Baltic folk wisdom, which teaches that knowledge about the essence and creation of things will give humans power over them. 

North Carolina native Caroline Shaw is one of the leading composers in the United States today. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in composition and multiple GRAMMY awards, her experience as a singer has helped her develop a distinctive sound in the choral music world. Her 2017 composition, and the swallow, sets portions of Psalm 84 in a warm and uplifting sonic world using techniques of double-choir, rhythmic displacement, and multi-tonal chords that create, in the end, a sense of arrival and safety.

In nature, ochre is a natural clay earth pigment found where there are mixtures of iron oxide, clay, and sand. It ranges in color from yellow, to deep orange, brown, and red. Shaw’s musical work, Ochre, is a 30-minute composition sung in seven movements, for choir and percussion. Through varied techniques, it elicits innovative colors of sound, varying as the colors of ochre do, and uses text fragments less as narrative and more as framing devices. The best description comes from the composer’s notes in the score:

“I like to write music for voices without text, because it allows the voice to be a colorful instrument independent of language. And I like to combine different kinds of text, fragments from various eras and sources, to build a nuanced frame for thinking about a subject. Ochre lives more in vowels and timbres than in text, but I’ve woven in fragments of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (which frames human existence with metaphors of geologic time, iron ore, rock), as well as a partial setting of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied in Longfellow’s translation. (Goethe was a geologist, and goethite — a common mineral in ochres — is named for him.) In general, there is both a mournful quality to this material, but also a sense of joy and wonder about the planet, and really about music and the voice.

The fifth movement contains the formula for the iron oxide compound hematite — Fe2O3 in its unhydrated form, resulting in red ochre — and Fe2O3 · H2O for the yellow ochre of hydrated hematite.

Humans are themselves displays of complex sedimentary processes. “In the human there is material, fragment, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos,” a stone-loving Nietzsche once proclaimed (Beyond Good and Evil, 117). We grow magnetite rocks in our heads, hematite in our organs, carbonates in our bones, gorgeous crystalline geodes in our kidneys, and when we die, our minerals are redistributed, largely as ashes or clumps of carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, and a handful of other elements. Dust to dust.”

Atlanta-based composer Joel Thompson’s The Caged Bird Sings for Freedom is a setting of the famous poem by Maya Angelou, written for choir, piano, and clarinet. The clarinet serves as an avatar for the bird, soaring when free, and when caged, repressed and kept grounded, which for a bird is the opposite of living. In the end, though, the poem’s refrain is taken up first by a soloist and then by the full chorus, through which, just as in Shaw’s and the swallow, the bird is elevated – to flight, to a home in the heights full of color, to freedom.

The NC State University Choral Artists is a public-private partnership between the NC State University choral music program and professionals in the vocal music industry that brings excellent and innovative choral music to NC State. The work of many people is necessary for performances such as this. In particular, the performers, DPAT faculty members, and our collaborative pianist, Tom Koch. We are also grateful for the hard work of our staff members and for the support of Vice Chancellor and Dean, Doneka R. Scott, without which this program would not be possible.

Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!

Wretched iron! Cursed bog ore!

You flesh-eater, gnawer of bones,

You spiller of innocent blood!

Scoundrel, how did you get power?

Tell how you became so haughty!

Curse you! Wretched iron!

I know your birth, you purblind fool,

I know well your source, you villain!

Once there walked three nature spirits,

three fiery daughters of the sky.

They milked their swelling breasts to earth,

they squeezed their milk onto the fens.

From the first maid spurted black iron,

this turned into soft wrought iron.

White milk squirted the second maid,

this was the source of tempered steel.

The third maid spouted blood-red milk,

this gave birth to bog iron ore.

Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!

Wretched iron! Cursed bog ore!

Then you were not high and mighty,

not yet mighty, not yet haughty,

when you sloshed in swamps and marshes,

when in bogholes you were trampled.

Curse you! Wretched iron!

I know your birth, you purblind fool!

I know well your source, you villain!

A wolf then ran across the fen,

a shambling bear walked in the moor.

And the swamp stirred in the wolf tracks,

under the bear’s paws moved the moor.

And there sprouted iron seedlings

in the traces of the wolf’s claws,

in the hollows of the bear tracks.

Ohoy, iron! Child of boghole!

Swamp’s red rust and gentle smooth milk!

Tell me, who made you so baleful!

Who decreed your works of evil?

Death was riding through the marshes,

plague was on a winter journey.

Seedling steel it found in swampland,

rusty iron in a boghole.

The great death then began to talk,

the killer plague then spoke and said:

In a pine grove on a hillside,

in a field behind the village,

far beyond the farmers’ granges,

right here will be the forge of death.

Here I’ll build the forge’s furnace,

here I’ll place the widest bellows,

here I’ll start to boil the iron,

fan and blast the rust-red bog ore,

hammer anger into iron.

Iron, poor man, shivered, trembled,

shivered, trembled, shuddered, quavered,

when he heard the call for fire,

heard the plea for flaming anger.

Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!

Then you were not high and mighty,

not yet mighty, not yet haughty,

moaning in the white-hot furnace,

whining under beating hammers.

Droned the old man on the oven,

groaned the greybeard from the furnace:

Iron stretches, spreads like blubber,

Trickles, flows like dripping spittle,

oozing from the blazing furnace,

flowing from the scorching fire.

Iron, you’re still soft and gentle.

How have you yet to be tempered

to make steel from harmless iron?

Get the spittle from an adder!

Bring the venom from a viper!

For iron wouldn’t harbor evil

without spittle from a serpent,

without venom from a black snake.

Droned the old man on the oven,

groaned the greybeard from the furnace:

Shelter us, supreme Creator!

Keep us safe now, God Almighty!

So that mankind would not perish,

mother’s child vanish without trace

from the face of the earth, from life,

from existence, God’s creation.

New eras. New gods and heroes.

And cannons and airplanes

and tanks, and guns.

New steel and iron.

Brand-new, intelligent,

precise, powerful killers,

equipped with automated guiding devices,

armed with nuclear warheads.

Missiles invulnerable to defensive rocketry.

Knives and spears,

axes, halberds, sabers,

and slings and tomahawks and boomerangs,

bows and arrows, rocks and warclubs,

and claws and teeth, sand and salt,

dust and tar, napalm and coal.

Brand-new and up-to-date technology,

the ultimate word in electronics,

ready to fly in any direction,

stay undeflected on its course, hit the target,

paralyze, and knock out of action, obliterate,

render helpless and defenseless,

harm and hurt, cause unknowable loss,

and kill, kill with iron and with steel,

with chromium, titanium, uranium, plutonium,

and with a multitude of other elements.

Ohoy, villain! Evil iron!

Blade of the sword, mother of war!

Boghole ore’s the golden guardian,

but you, steel, are kin to evil!

Curse you! Wretched iron!

We are kinsmen, of the same breed,

of the same seed we have sprouted.

You are earth-born, I am earth-born,

in the black soil we are brethren.

For we both live on the same earth

and in that earth we two will merge.

There will be land enough for both.

How beloved is your dwelling place, o Lord of hosts.

My soul yearns, my heart and my flesh cry out.

The sparrow found a house, 

and the swallow her nest where she may raise her young.

They pass through the valley of bakka,

They make it a place of springs.

The autumn rains also cover it with pools.

(wordless)

Overall

quiet now

hearest thou

a breath

— fragments from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wandrers Nachtlied 2

The solid earth whereon we tread.

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming random forms,

The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man.

— Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118

Scarpèd cliff and quarried stone

— Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 56

(wordless)

Fe2O3 H2O

Mille regretz, de vous abandonner

Et d’eslong…

Quon me verra [brief mes jours definer.]

My brief da…so soon

Translation:

A thousand regrets at deserting you

and leaving behind…

That it seems [soon my days will dwindle away.]

— fragment from a 15th-c. chanson, att. to Josquin des Prez

Contemplate all this work of Time,

…

As dying Nature’s earth and lime;

Within oneself, from more to more;

…

Life is not as idle ore.

— Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118

hear     hush   still   quiet   sleep

now     you   all   wait   soon