- [Rosemary] For centuries, people from all walks of life would enter this labyrinth, seeking enlightenment, a sacred path to their soul. In the dawn of his life, a young boy opened the labyrinth gates, driven by excitement, captivated by a dream. He began a quest that he believed was his destiny, though he could not see what was coming. Doubtful and confused, he was no longer certain of his fate. Does this sound familiar? Were you always certain of your fate, about where you were headed? How did things turn out for you? So pay attention to what you are about to see and how this story unfolds.

 

- [Mari] The Amazon rainforest has long been a region of mystery and wonder, where explorers came seeking an ancient civilization, where the world's widest river winds deep into the unknown. And here beneath the jungle canopy live people, plants, and animals hidden from the outside world. Those entering this realm must prepare for the unexpected. In my case, it's where a surprising friendship was born. In a corner of this vast rainforest, some 800 kilometers from Lima, Peru's capital is the missionary outpost where I met Michael Dodds. In August, 1971, Michael's parents, Larry and Lois Dodds moved their family far from their comfortable home in California to Yarinacocha to serve the needs of the indigenous people and the missionaries.

 

- My father was a medical doctor who wanted to be like Albert Schweitzer, the great doctor, and Bach scholar and philanthropist. So he dedicated his life to helping others.

 

- [Mari] My father, Manuel Bonnemaison shared that dedication to helping others. He was approving orthopedic surgeon who worked in Lima. after training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. One day, Larry Dodds called him asking for help on a rare orthopedic case. My father had to fly on a pontoon plane deep into the rainforest and operated on a little boy from one of the indigenous tribes. The operation was a success, and this is how our families became friends. It wasn't long before I was spending summers in Yarinacocha, living with the Dodds. Michael was the family extrovert, and I hit it off with him.

 

- [Michael] When Mari would come out to the jungle, she always seemed like quite a city kid, but she was very brave, holding all the wild animals, and even a snake. Growing up in the jungle really made a huge impact, not only on me, but also on my brother David and my sister Catherine. We were always barefoot. It was so hot there. Any chance we could, we ran into the water. At Yarina, the houses had tin roofs. Instead of glass windows, there were screens so the wind would blow through the house. For me, the sense of connectedness with nature, seeing its raw beauty up close was just wonderful. ♪ There's a yellow rose in Texas that I am gonna see ♪

 

- Our next door neighbors had a big parrot, a green parrot named Tex, who sang the "Yellow rose of Texas". This parrot learned to copy my voice. He'd call, "Michael, Catherine, David!"

 

- His favorite thing to say was, "Shut the door Michael," because I was always leaving the door open and drove my mom crazy.

 

- But then the parrot would also answer, "Yes, mom." So sometimes the parrot would call the kids' names and they thought it was me, and then they come and say, "Well, what'd you want mom?" And I'd say, "I didn't call you."

 

- In the Amazon, the rain was just an incredibly dense torrent on the tin roof. It's absolutely deafening. The Amazon at night is like this giant minimalist symphony. There's so many layers and textures to the sound. Your ear could never fully penetrate that tapestry of sound. It was just beautiful. Growing up, my childhood friend, Jimmy owned an enormous Anaconda, which appeared in "National Geographic", and there was a picture of Jimmy riding the Anaconda. My dad was standing right next to the "National Geographic" photographer and got almost the identical photo. Sadly, Jimmy disappeared shortly after. We don't know what happened to him. That's actually not true . It was as a child in Peru that I first started to fall in love with music. I remember coming downstairs for breakfast on Sunday mornings and my dad would be blasting Bach from the stereo, and that really sparked my musical imagination as a kid, and that created in me a longing to play music myself. I wanted to be a violinist. I wanted to be a composer. I wanted to be a conductor. I remember as a middle schooler, I made a baton out of wood. I would ride around without hands conducting while riding the bicycle. And I was just like, these are really ruddy roads. They're holes everywhere. When I got to high school, I traveled to Lima to take violin lessons and play in a youth orchestra, and I would stay with Mari's family. One of my favorite memories of Lima was when Mari's mother, Maria Bonnemaison took Mari's brother Alex and me to go hear the National Symphony of Peru. I was captivated by the sounds. I really wanted to be a conductor on a professional level. So I set up a lesson with a really famous maestro in Lima. So I got into the taxi, and on the way to this, what was gonna be my first private conducting lesson, I was sexually assaulted by the taxi driver. It was terrifying. I finally got out and ran away. I arrived at the door of the National Theater. The maestro was not there. The combination of those two events within five minutes of each other destroyed any sense of self I had. I blamed myself for what had happened. I felt like I was worthless. I was in absolute darkness and despair, self hatred and self blame. I carried inside this deep shame about what happened for years. I didn't even tell my parents about it until I was in my 30's.

 

- Imagine all this stuff is happening to you and you're just a kid, just a teenager. If he would've told my mom or he would've told Lois what had happened to him, they would've never let him come back to Lima. And if he wouldn't come back to Lima, he could not continue growing as a musician, which was his dream. So he had to take a choice. I was going in my head, "Oh my gosh, his parents, "these missionary Christian lovely people had sent their son "to our house and my mom is so protecting and loving "and my dad, and we never knew this happened to him." It was horrible.

 

- Many of us never share those traumatic experiences. And the child particularly learns to repress the experience, which means repressing themselves and give the world what they think the world needs. The sad thing is this causes a separation between the head self and the heart self.

 

- [Mari] He said that he went into a very deep depression. It was the darkest time in his life.

 

- Hurt becomes shame, and shame is a very deep, painful emotion that occurs when a very important dream, wish, or expectation is shattered. And the seeds of that shame created in me a very deep self hatred that made me believe I didn't have anything to offer. In the days and months that followed, my head and heart started to operate on two different levels. In my heart, I felt this profound shame and self-loathing, but in my head, I was continuing forward with my music studies. I focused more and more on my studies in music, and eventually it came time to start a new chapter in my life. I went to the college where my father had gone. I received a fantastic musical education, grew greatly in my integration of my intellect, and grew as a violinist, and composer, and conductor and musician. At Wheaton, I met Jane Robertson.

 

- I was an English major, but also very involved in studio art at the time. We met each other at church and we had a connection. I loved to hear him tell stories about Peru and the mission field.

 

- Art has always been a very important part of the relationship between Jane and me. In fact, our first date was to the Art Institute of Chicago, and that's kind of how our relationship was born.

 

- We married right out of college at Christmas time. It was shortly after that he was starting to apply for graduate school. He needed German. And so I said, "Well, if you wanna learn German, "why don't you go to a country that speaks German? "We better do it now before we start having children."

 

- Right as we were about to leave, we discovered that she was pregnant with Francis.

 

- So we went ahead and went, despite not having a job over there, not having money.

 

- We thought, "It's now or never. "If we don't go, this will never happen." To live in Vienna, the city of Haydn, and Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, and Moller, and Zemlinsky, and Schonberg, that was where my sense of musical connection with the past really came alive. After Vienna, I came back and went to the Eastman School of Music. And when I was first there, my first week, I met Alfred Mann, a specialist in the music of Bach and Handel. And right away, we struck up a close relationship that continued every week for eight years, we had lunch together when we were both in town.

 

- Alfred Mann was the only person I ever knew that smelled actually liked tobacco and peppermint.

 

- He was like a grandfather to me in many ways, and he showed me how you could be a scholar and a conductor, or a scholar and a musician. During my studies at the Eastman school, three of our children were born. Being a father has taught me to love deeply with compassion, and it's given me a chance to share with them one of my greatest joys in life. The bow goes like that, okay?

 

- [Child] I wanna do it on my own, dad.

 

- My dad was always doing something with music, walking on the beach, walking in the grocery store, in an airport, wherever. He was never shy about making music.

 

- [Owen] I remember him walking around the house with some salad tongs, clinking the salad tongs together in the rhythm of the habanera while singing the melody.

 

- I found it so horrifying that my parents knew so little about anything to do with pop culture. I mean, they knew who the Beatles were, but it was just not a part of our world.

 

- Yeah, I remember when I was younger, I was always embarrassed of how much of a nerd he was in music and everything. I guess as I grew up, I sort of find myself doing some of the same things.

 

- Sometimes when we're like flying places, he just suddenly strikes down and doing pushups in the airport and stuff.

 

- I guess those kind of moments were kind of what made us all the family who we were, and he was expressing himself. It was him.

 

- My relationship with my father was different than the one I have with my kids. As a missionary doctor in the Amazon, he was literally out there saving the world. People would show up on our doorstep at all times of day or night, and he would care for them. And even though as a father to me, he was very compassionate and always a healer, I always wondered how important was I to him really? And so there was always this emotional distance between us, something that for years kept us apart. And then in the late '90s came some devastating news. My father was diagnosed with ALS, and at the time it seemed like it was a horrible diagnosis. We expected he would have a year or two to live. It forced me to break through the wall of silence that had always existed between us as father and son.

 

- My grandparents were always the people that my dad would try to make proud. Much of this was on sort of an intellectual level with my grandpa as well as a musical level with him.

 

- I know that his relationship with his dad was something that was so deeply important to him. It was a struggle too, because my dad's really different from my grandfather. My dad is really extroverted, and my grandfather I think was always a bit more introverted.

 

- I told him one day in France in the Alps. We were at a retreat up there. I told him, "Dad, I really need your love, "and your approval and your blessing in my life." And he responded so beautifully. He said, "You have all of that, Michael, my love, "my approval, my blessing. "I couldn't be more proud of the man that you've become." And after that time, we enjoyed the closest relationship imaginable. And then he kept on living, and he lived almost 10 years. I continued to develop as an artist, as a thinker, as a student, learned even much greater depth, got a PhD in musicology, studying the creative process of other composers. But still, there was something missing. I couldn't somehow use that music in the service of what my heart really wanted to say.

 

- The hurt is still acting inside his heart. The sad thing is the person is separated from themselves. They have a split life.

 

- For many years, I've gone to Washington DC and visited the National Gallery of Art. So many times I had walked past this self portrait of Rembrandt as an old man, but this one time, I was just arrested, stopped in my tracks by this portrait. It was as if Rembrandt himself was interrogating me. This is what Rembrandt with those piercing eyes said to me right into the bottom of my soul, "Are you being true to your art?" And I just thought, "This is the most bizarre question." But then I realized, no, I need to accept that identity. I am an artist. And in the asking of that question, "Are you being true to your art?" I realized what that meant, and what that means for me is that my head needs to serve my heart. For most of my life, head and heart have been disconnected. It took me a long time to find healing from that, it took love from my family, my parents, and my wife, and my children. It took lots of therapy, but it also took just spiritual growth on my part. A lot of experience of grace, the realization for a daily dependence on God to get through life.

 

- Only if there is an opening to real deep love, either through a parent, either through a stranger, either through an active nature, sometimes through a tragic accident, only through a deep love will a person sort of touch their shame. And when that love touches the shame, it melts the shame full self. And a person is in touch with their feelings of abandonment, rejection, and humiliation. But once they're in touch with their shame, the good news is this, it melts the shame and opens the person to their true essence, their true self.

 

- And it's only as I've grown in love that head and heart have grown back together. So finally, all the stuff that I know, the head knowledge about counterpoint and orchestration, and all of that can come together and really serve an expressive purpose of joy and of love. Since 2005, I've been teaching music history at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The key of D Major in Western music, what are its associations? Yes, why is D major soft often associated with world theater? Trumpets, trumpets in the 18th century were usually pitched in either C or D. Every year at the School of the Arts commencement, I heard some words that were originally by Martha Graham, the great choreographer. And every year Rosemary Harris, the great Broadway actress and screen actress would read these words to the graduates.

 

- There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist in any other medium and it'll be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly. Keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching.

 

- I heard it year after year after year, and finally it started to sink in and I finally said, "I have to take my composing more seriously." And not long afterward, I got the chance. I was on the committee planning the 150th anniversary celebration for my church. I wanted to commission a composer, some famous composer to write a big piece for us. And the senior pastor at the time, Harry Daniels said, "No, I really think you should write it." And I swallowed hard and said, "Okay, I'd love to." So I wrote the first movement for first pres, and then about two, three weeks after the performance, I was to not sure what to do next. That night, I got a call from Crisis Control Ministry.

 

- We were able to actually reach out to Michael because we knew that he had had the first movement of the symphony the previous fall, and it was wonderful. It was beautiful, very well received. And we thought the musical offering as a centerpiece of the worship service would just be a wonderful way to pull all elements of the community together.

 

- Within a week, the orchestral funding, the chorus and the occasion all came together. It was thrilling. It wasn't something I put together at all. It just was a gift.

 

- So when people experience their true self and become grateful, the arts just explode. Their music starts to play. They start to dance. The points of life start to connect, even abject tragedy somehow beauty flows through because love is even stronger than death.

 

- Composing was something that my dad wanted to do for a really long time, and this symphony sort of changed everything. It made him feel like it was finally time to start down that path.

 

- I'm coming early to it. Thank you for telling me. Immediately, I thought of Psalm 145 because Psalm 145 is one of the most joyful Psalms. And it has within it the line that says, "One generation will proclaim your works to another." And that's seemed perfect for a church anniversary celebration. You're shaking your head, but that was tremendously better, okay? That's what you have to do. The piece is really about on a fundamental level, how love connects us from one generation to another and how love gives us hope, and love gives us strength in adversity. Ultimately, the piece is a celebration of love. The two summers that I spent composing Psalm 145 were the happiest work hours of my life because I felt so integrated that I was singing, I was dancing, I was playing piano, I was playing violin, I was writing things down on paper, I was working my butt off. Literally, it's the act of creativity puts yourself back together again.

 

- It was a huge challenge to write a symphony in a year. And so I think Michael had the gumption and the fearlessness to continue working on his piece even when he wasn't sure it was gonna come out.

 

- It's one thing to write a short piece of music, but to write a 40 minute piece of music, that's a different kind of process.

 

- Every time that he would call me, he would tell me, "I'm working on this symphony." I didn't really have any conception of what that was gonna become.

 

- Psalm 145 naturally breaks down into four sections based on the content. That's why it just seemed very natural to to divide it into four symphonic movements with other subdivisions within it.

 

- A very crucial part of any composer's compositional process is taking the time to conceptualize the piece and really hear the, this is where a lot of the main ideas come from.

 

- There's a lot of meaning, a lot of structure, a lot of complexity that's below the surface. My compositional process for this piece started with using a process called Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina is a medieval spiritual practice that is called sacred reading. You start by just reading the text and then meditating on it. What does it mean? Then you pray it back to God. And the fourth stage is contemplation, to sit quietly in the presence of the text. This is the most transformational way of engaging with scripture, and it was something that my father practiced every day, and that is where the inspiration then comes out of.

 

- My father's creative process usually begins somewhere in nature I would say. He oftentimes will sort of take walks.

 

- I have always felt a deep sense of connection with nature, and I think this goes back to growing up in the Peruvian Amazon. And that sense of feeling connected to the creation is so important to me.

 

- The breathing of the air, the inspiration that you can obtain by being around nature is phenomenal. That is a tremendous force, a tremendous drive for an artist.

 

- The beach is perfect because the white noise of the surf blots out all other sound, and it enables me to really hear what's going on in my head. When I am in that creative state, I try to empty my mind and just allow the words to start finding a melody. And then I gradually worked those melodies into what's called a continuity draft where I had a continuous line of melody all the way through. Then there's a process involved in translating what I'm hearing in my imagination down onto the page. The last stage is to orchestrate and to assign the melodies and harmonies to different instruments and voices. That's what this full score is. So here I've got it scored for the strings, kind of low strings with harp. And then as we go a little bit further, I start to add in more instruments. Then the whole string session comes in and most of the woodwinds, and then we get to a new section and the brass come in.

 

- As I spoke with Michael, he was telling me of all these layers, and I was looking at this book when he was writing and composing, and it was lines after lines of lines. These are such complex terms that when people are looking at or hearing at the symphony, they have no idea.

 

- And I feel like the first time that it had actually really hit home how big it was, was when I looked at the score and I was like, "Oh my God, you wrote all of these parts? "That's crazy." That blew my mind.

 

- In writing this piece, I feel like I'm giving something back to God because what I'm offering back to God is the gifts that He gave me. And I've developed them and used them. One of my friends in college once said, "The best way you can express thanks for a gift "is to use it, or if it's a sweater, to wear it." I was writing it for specific musicians and I was writing it for specific singers. So I wanted to write music that I knew they would love to sing.

 

- Michael writes for his choir. The melodies are something that can be recognizable for singers of all types, but it has a complexity to it that is creative. Michael would ask me about the vocal line. So he was writing for my voice, which was really fantastic, and when a composer does that, singers really appreciate it.

 

- And he's fun to work with. He's very enthusiastic, and you like singing for him and you want to learn the music.

 

- I'm a colleague of Michael's from the School of the Arts, so he gave me this fantastic second trim apart with some solos in it. So I'll play a little bit of that.

 

- Singing with Michael is always a thrill. I mean, I would quite frankly, I would sing the back of a cereal box if he wrote music for it.

 

- He would play parts of the symphony for me, compositions that he was beginning, and I would always get frustrated when he would change the composition later after I had memorized it or gotten attached to it.

 

- No, it won't at all. He's gonna come in .

 

- He not only explains the music, he might give us historical background, all kinds of things that will help us sing it.

 

- Everyone had a lot of stuff to play. Every single person down to percussion, harp, they all had solos. For us as orchestral musicians, when we get to play a lot of chamber music, a lot of solos, and it's good writing idiomatic for our instruments, we are invested. It makes us dig in and kind of give our best.

 

- My dad has sort of a jigsaw puzzle sensibility about inspiration, meaning that he draws a lot of inspiration from intellectual things. There's something about classical art that he loves because it's like an intellectual treasure. It's putting all the small pieces of knowledge together to make this thing whole and understand it as much as possible.

 

- In my studies of musicology, I've been really interested in how musicians from the past have thought about the structure of music, music theory, the history of music theory. So that sense of connection with the past and the way that it connects with who I am as a person, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, that's kind of what I'm all about. So in Psalm 145, I'm having a dialogue with the composers of the past. I'm wanting to meet them almost on their own terms, even though of course, I bring my own 21st century perspective. Circles are a big part of my musical imagination in this piece, It starts with a text, this whole idea of the whole round world, the broad curving horizon of the of the sea, the sphere of the heavens. And this works itself into the music in several ways. One is through specific musical figures like , which repeats and overlaps with itself in a circle. In the first movement, I have the rolling sea reflected through what's called a circle of fifth progression . And this comes here in the music in the first movement as the cellos are sort of representing the rolling waves. And then the chorus comes in with the soprano line being this sort of big, smooth curve of the horizon. One of the great joys of writing this piece was writing it for people. I dedicated the first movement to the choir. Psalm 145 is of course written by David. But what tends to happen when we read the Psalms is that we see in those Psalms our own experiences.

 

- [Speaker] Extension on cord, yeah, that one.

 

- So at the very beginning of the symphony, I evoke the idea of David, King David with his harp and the solo tenor. ♪ I will exalt You my God the King ♪ ♪ I will praise Your name forever and ever ♪

 

- And that melody right there provides almost all the other melodies in the piece. It's woven throughout. ♪ I will exalt Your name forever and ever ♪

 

- When Michael introduced us to the first movement, he talked about how the waves would come in unevenly and crash. And you could literally hear that in his music. There was a underlying rhythm and beat to the music.

 

- [Michael] It's more that feeling of longing for something transcendent. When I'm at the ocean, it creates that feeling of being next to something that is vast, something enormously bigger than me, horizons to be explored, and there's constantly changing beauty. That connection with nature awakens my longing.

 

- I remember when we were performing that, I was standing right by the timpani and we would sing, "His greatness, no one can fathom", and the timpani went off right in my ear. It was just amazing.

 

- The favorite passage for me is the second movement, the pastoral. It's very contemplative and it starts out with unison men singing, "The Lord is gracious." On the repeat of this section, the melody is taken by the violins.

 

- The second movement, I dedicated it to my father because of the spiritual truths he taught me. I strongly associate that text, "The Lord is gracious and compassionate" with him. He was diagnosed with ALS. At that time, it was a horrible diagnosis. And I would say that the last few years of his life, when his ALS was most progressed, when he also had cancer, and he also had another life threatening condition, were the most joyful years of his life.

 

- As I look back, I can see that all the experiences I've had have been preparation for the next stage. Out of this, I've developed the notion that God is stingy. He doesn't waste any opportunities He gives us, and we'll reuse that in the future. But God is compassionate and gracious, and that's basically what I'm staking my life on right now, that no matter what happens in the course of ALS, that God will show Himself, slow to anger, full of loving kindness. And my task is to keep my eyes open so I can see God doing that.

 

- In the second movement, representing the rolling green hills of my imagination, we have another circulating movement, what in Baroque music is called a basso ostinato. It's a rising pattern that repeats again and again throughout the piece . Violins are playing this other tighter circles . So circles within circles and over this is unfolding a long, curving contemplative line. So it's like those little motives are representing the turning over of thoughts in meditation. The third movement, I dedicated it to my daughter who was going through a very severe, very, very difficult personal crisis where I was afraid for her life. And it even reached the point where I was struggling to believe some of the words from Psalm 145 that I was writing.

 

- I was dealing with a lot of addictions and I was very distant from my family and really didn't even know my dad was composing this symphony.

 

- The period that Laura went through that my dad referenced in the third movement was probably one of the hardest times that our family's ever experienced. I don't think that there's ever been anything quite so terrifying, probably for my parents or for us.

 

- The words in that third movement, the Psalm starts with, "The Lord is faithful to all His promises "and loving toward all He has made." So there is a tension in those words because things happen in our life that make us question the truth of those words. We have people we love who die, or get sick, or bad things happen. And we ask questions like, "Is this what faithfulness looks like?"

 

- I had to just eventually kind of surrender and say, "Okay, God, I don't know if you're faithful "to all of Your promises, "if something really terrible happens with my daughter, "but I'm gonna trust You." And as soon as I sort of reached that spiritual point of surrender, which was extremely hard to do because I felt like I was turning my daughter over to death, to sort of admit that. As soon as I did the music just came, started coming out again. For me, creativity and faith are virtually inseparable. They both require surrender to something beyond one's self, but there's this admission in the midst of all that that I just can't do this. And yet what always happens is that, well, yes you can. When there's that admission of powerlessness in the creative act, somehow you find your way and that which you didn't know becomes something that you now know and it all comes together. I was thinking a lot about Strauss' Alpine Symphony when I was writing this piece. The texture builds gradually with this idea , derived from the opening, but it builds up in the sense of excitement. The excitement that I feel when I drive into the Alps and the mountains get closer and closer and there's that thrill. So I captured this in the music, in these densely imitative cascades of sound that come rolling down like musical waterfalls. We reach this point in this long mountainous movement where we run into a valley. And in this valley, the tone gets a lot darker. At this point, the choir chants the English text, kind of using Anglican chant and then the soloist sings in Hebrew. The reason I chose Hebrew was because I wanted to get closer to the original language. I wanted to capture that intimacy of David and his harp.

 

- I actually dedicated this section of the movement to Father Maximilian Kolbe, who was a priest who was imprisoned in Auschwitz.

 

- He chose to die of starvation so that other men would not have to do. And so Michael was thinking about that when the words of the Psalms say, "The Lord is near to all who call upon Him," that means even in terrible situations like starving to death, the Lord is near to all who call upon Him.

 

- The idea that Father Kolbe chose to be with those other people in their darkest development and to go through that with them is one of the most powerful examples of love that I can think of.

 

- To know that backstory, the thing that was going on in Michael's mind, and to sing that piece of music at the same time was very, very moving.

 

- It builds up to this really intense climax with the soprano, the tenor, and the mezzo. There's this very disturbing text in this Psalm, "All the wicked, He will destroy." It's a disturbing text, and I struggled with how to set this musically. It makes me think actually of the apocalypse of John. And there, there are four trumpets, the four trumpets of the apocalypse, and they blow from north, south, east, and west. So I decided to do exactly that in my compositions. That cataclysmic moment is actually heralding a new beginning. This cataclysm actually represents the beginning of the new creation, and that ushers in this finale of joy. ♪ My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord ♪

 

- So this experience of what I consider divine comfort in the midst of despair is something that enters into the piece. This soprano, and tenor, and mezzo soprano start crying out to God. It's this black darkness with the muffled based drum and the tam-tam. And into that darkness comes the flute, which to me represents the Holy Spirit, this little white light in this very dark place. I could never have written the third movement the way that I did if my daughter hadn't been going through that hard time because it's reflected in the music. The word in Hebrew for spirit also means breath, ruach. So I chose the breathiest of instruments to represent the white light of the Holy Spirit coming into darkness in a very quiet way and proclaiming love to the people in darkness. And that is the spiritual black hole that is at the center of the joy in this piece, just as that pivotal experience in my life is also this, where all the good things in my life flow out of. It's because of that knowledge of who I am, that I am loved. ♪ My mouth will speak in a praise of the Lord ♪

 

- In the fourth movement, I dedicated it to one of my mentors in music, Alfred Mann, who was one of the leading experts on fugue. I could never have written that fugal finale without Alfred's tremendous love and encouragement and his brilliant teaching. The last movement of my symphony is a double fugue. Bach and Handel loved doing these. The way the double fugue works is it has two melodies. The first one in my fugue is, ♪ My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord the Lord ♪ ♪ My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord the Lord ♪

 

- And the second subject. ♪ Let every creature praise His Holy name ♪ ♪ Let every creature praise His name ♪ ♪ Let every creature praise His name ♪

 

- And then near the climax of the fourth movement, I bring the two together. ♪ My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord the Lord ♪

 

- The Psalm ends with the phrase, "Let every creature praise His Holy name forever and ever." And every creature, every bird, every fish, this sense of profound connectedness with the cosmos and with the earthly creation.

 

- I have never sung a piece of music that the composer is also conducting, that was a new experience for me. And one of the things I thought about a lot was how exciting it must have been for Michael to have heard this beautiful music that he composed coming back at him.

 

- And that's why at the end of the symphony, I thought, "I have to have the audience sing."

 

- I will never read that Psalm again without hearing the music in my head.

 

- It was no surprise that it was so romantic and expressive.

 

- I just made sure that I let him know how great of a job he did.

 

- I think that's really something to be proud of.

 

- Michael values excellence. He values excellence because it's a reflection on the gifts that he has been given by God. And Michael always does that with such grace and such care for the individuals, that's a true gift.

 

- It's pretty hard for me to separate being a person of faith from being an artist. Both faith and creativity require an admission of powerlessness and a surrender to what needs to be born. So I start on my knees admitting that I need grace. It's all about a desire to put things back together again, to be face to face with God. The self doubt that I used to have is gone. I know what I can do now, and I've also come to believe its worth.