OUR NEXT CONCERT

Saturday | 14 December 2024 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

Sunday | 15 December 2024 | 7:00pm

Christ Episcopal Church

310 North K Street | Tacoma

For the final concert of its 31st season, The Esoterics is thrilled to present Jeffrey Derus’ From wilderness. Derus’ composition is scored for chorus, soloists, crystal singing bowls, and cello, and is a meditation on the transformative experience of traveling the Pacific Crest Trail, from Campo, California, through 28 stops in northern California, Oregon, and Washington state, ending in Manning Park, British Columbia.

In this hour-long wash of serene sound, you will find moments to reflect on the sacredness of nature, and discover the beauty within yourself. The 25 voices of The Esoterics will be guided by a celestial sound-bath of eight crystal singing bowls, and accompanied the obbligato cello of soloist Paige Stockley. This work features texts by twenty different poets, including Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Robert Frost, Lord Byron, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Muir, Carl Sandburg, Hilda Doolittle, Lucy Eddy, Kate Chopin, and Nora Ghassan Addullatif.

In his piece, Derus has aligned the rainbow of seven pitches of the singing bowls and their sacred syllables (lam, vam, ram, yam, ham, ksham, and om) with the seven chakras of the body (the root, sacrum, solar plexus, heart, throat, brow, and crown), as well as their attributes: stability, pleasure, confidence, compassion, communication, intuition, and awareness. Five soloists will give voice to different “spirit animals” (the wolf, fox, fish, eagle, and mockingbird) that one might encounter on the trail.

Through landscape and soundscape, supported by the architecture of poetry and ancient Sanskrit homeopathy, From wilderness offers an opportunity for meditation, self-discovery, wonder, and healing. We hope that you can join The Esoterics for this extraordinary choral event of quiet introspection and profound beauty.