Oraculum (2016)

Composer Note

The affective substrate for Oraculum comes from two related sources: divination and voice. Near the end of her life, my mother became occupied with filling spiral notebooks with odd sets of numbers. I wondered what this activity might symbolize — or portend. Then I came across her collection of “dream books.” The 19th century produced a large variety of such pamphlets, including the apocryphal “Napoleon’s Oraculum,” purportedly discovered in an Egyptian royal tomb, translated from the hieroglyphic, and adopted by Bonaparte himself in military engagements. But my mother’s dream books were very different from Napoleon’s. For her, a 1950s participant in the Great Migration of the descendants of former slaves from the rural American South, a boulder of salt was required in encountering interpretations such as, “If you dream of a Negro, your desires will be unfulfilled.” In contrast, the notion of the oracular led me to the trope of the trombone as God’s voice, variously attributed to Beethoven, Brahms, Martin Luther, James Weldon Johnson, and Hildegard of Bingen, who called herself “die Posaune Gottes.” The notion of the trombone as the ultimate voice, the cryptic word of the oracle, allows me free rein in my musical imagination.

— George Lewis