The Crossing: Aaron Helgeson's The Book of Never

THE BOOK OF NEVER

music by Aaron Helgeson

performed by The Crossing

June 20, 2025

5:30pm Pre-concert discussion on The Book of Never, the war in Ukraine, and its impact on artists

7:00pm Performance

Saint Peter's Church

619 Lexington Avenue

New York, NY 10022

TICKETING

Tickets are $40 for general admission, with a pay-as-you-can option. 100% of ticket proceeds will be donated to Safe Passage 4 Ukraine, helping re-home those displaced by the ongoing war.

THE MUSIC

The Book of Never, winner of a 2024 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, is a thirty-minute choral exhortation based on the ancient Novgorod Codex — a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. believed to be owned by Isaakiy, a monk living in the (formerly Ukrainian) village of Novgorod excommunicated for combining Pagan worship with Russian Orthodox Christianity. To save his culture he poured layer upon layer of wax over the book on which to write his prayers, his alphabet, scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apocalypse. The Book of Never combines fragments of these texts with words and phrases by twentieth century writers in various states of exile including Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, Thanhha Lai, and The Rolling Stones. These are paired with ancient hymn melodies associated with the Novgorod Codex, reverberated infinitely inside digitally engineered virtual spaces and then transcribed for choir to create music that is both timeful and timeless in its urgent cries across ages and across continents…far from home.

THE COMPOSER

Composer Aaron Helgeson uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts. Recent projects include the orchestral aria Sing Your Troubles Quiet commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation that fragments the folk song recordings of a Depression-era prisoner in Santa Fe, and his 2015 Ohio Arts Council Award winning Snow Requiem mixing shards of Norwegian folk song with sonified weather data from the 1888 Children’s Blizzard. Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson's own previous music. Residing in New York, Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and as Artist Fellow at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

THE CHOIR

Musical America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year, The Crossing is a four-time Grammy winning chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to creating and recording new music that expand ways of writing, singing, and listening to choral music. The ensemble was the American Composers Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music, and their commission Sound from The Bench by Ted Hearne was named a 2018 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. They were the recipient of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence and have received three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award with composer Joel Puckett from Chorus America. Having presented nearly 180 commissioned world premieres, the choir's recent projects include Julia Wolfe’s historical oratorio Fire in My Mouth with the New York Philharmonic, Tyondai Braxton’s manga-based choral symphony Telekinesis, and Robert Maggio’s theatrical work Aniara with The Netherlands’ Klockriketeatern.

Host or Publisher Arts and Architecture Conservancy at Saint Peter's