Self-Evident: Christopher Cerrone's Of Being Numerous
from Portraits in Transit by Caroline Bergstrøm Scheibel
Self-Evident
the world premiere of
Christopher Cerrone’s Of Being Numerous
w/ Present Music, Milwaukee
w/ Caroline Shaw’s Ochre (2022, reprise)
November 21, 2025
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
Program
Distant Maneuvers for Present Music (2023) – Paul Wiancko
Of Being Numerous (2025) – Christopher Cerrone
— world premiere —
Ochre (2022) – Caroline Shaw
I. Siderite
II. Limonite
III. Maghemite
IV. Magnetite
V. Hematite
VI. Vivianite
VII. Goethite
Of Being Numerous was commissioned for Present Music by Jan Serr & John Shannon.
Notes + Texts
Distant Maneuvers for Present Music
music by Paul Wiancko
A note from the composer:
I prefer composing at home in long stretches when possible, but Distant Maneuvers for Present Music had to be written in short, concentrated bursts over the course of 2 years, each in a different location and headspace. Enough time passed between sessions that I had little memory of the music I had previously written or how those ideas had been generated—it was as though a stranger had begun the process and it was up to me to decipher their intentions and pick up where they left off. The title refers to the resulting feeling that all of my decisions, even those long forgotten, were still unavoidably in control of my present trajectory. The music of Distant Maneuvers for Present Music is based on themes of conflict and culpability—it stumbles into frame with a [slap] before settling into a distant, kabuki-inspired “canto,” gradually growing nearer and more insistent before retreating once more. As violence and suffering continues to engulf the world around us, I hope that this piece might serve as a reminder that just as music composed in the past can seemingly reach across time to slap us in the face, so too can our own actions directly affect the lives of those struggling in distant places.
Of being numerous
music by Christopher Cerrone
text compiled by Christopher Cerrone, after George Oppen, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner
A note from the composer:
This work began as a fairly straight adaptation of the American poet George Oppen's “Of Being Numerous.” I have long loved Oppen's work—his insistence that we need each other, that the singular self is insufficient. Beyond the obvious analogy of a choir (numerous voices that speak as one), I was drawn to a text about the messy embrace of other people at a time when rampant isolation and individualism tears at society's fabric.
My son, Matteo, was born in March of this year, and shortly after—when he was three months old—I began composing this work. I quickly set the seventh stanza from "Of Being Numerous": Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular / We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous.
After writing this section, I began questioning what the work was really about. I was able to write because my wife Carrie and her mother were caring for our tiny baby. I was living exactly what Oppen describes—the impossibility of the singular self. So was this piece about society in the abstract, or about my own experience? I realized that showing my own transformation might be the most honest way to illustrate what happens when the focus shifts from the singular to the numerous.
I discussed these questions in the middle of the night with Carrie, an amazing writer and thinker in her own right, as we cared for Matteo (who did not like to sleep for more than a few hours at a time). She suggested the story of the piece was my own.
The work changed. It became about my own messy and joyful embrace of the multiplicity and complexity of the self and others. I used some of my favorite authors to tell this story: Oppen, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and even a fragment of T.S. Eliot. I set the time of the work at 3 a.m., a time I had never been so awake before. In the movements, I set their writings to music. Between movements, I wrote short interludes where AI-processed versions of the authors' literal voices perform monologues together with a solo voice, using fragments of their texts and electronic sounds adapted from my everyday life: breathing and sleeping sounds, bowls clanking.
The work's journey now starts with Oppen, then turns to Whitman, whose famous line from "Song of Myself " resonated like it never had before: Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.) The work includes a setting of a monologue from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying about how the self dissipates in sleep (and boy, ours did). Finally, we return to Oppen, where I set the original text again, but this time the ambiguous harmonies that opened the setting are replaced with optimism, and the work finally embraces being numerous.
Of Being Numerous was commissioned by Jan Serr and John Shannon for Present Music, who commissioned my first work for voice and ensemble, The Branch Will Not Break, ten years ago—a piece that was also performed by Donald Nally. This work is dedicated to Donald, The Crossing, and Present Music, and to Matteo, Carrie, and Grandma Qiao. I ask that they share this dedication with one another—because we don't become ourselves alone.
Prologue, 3AM
These voices find me at 3am
When I discover the singular has been wrecked
And consciousness scatters like a newborn's sleep
And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not
ese fragments I have shored against my exhaustion
Part 1: Of Being Numerous (George Oppen)
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous
Interlude
Having chosen the meaning of being numerous
The past and present wilt
Time scatters into moments: wake, feed, sleep
Whitman, born three miles away,
Knew something about multitudes
Very well then, Walt, help me, show me
Part 2: Song of Myself (Walt Whitman)
The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill the next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you,)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them at nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
Interlude 2
Too late, 3am
In a new, strange room, my self dissolved
Now I am multitudes
Now we are multitudes
Walt, I am emptied
George, I am emptied
And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not
Part 3: As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
Interlude 3
So I slept, we slept, thinking of, knowing home
the past and present wilt, then bloom
We have chosen the meaning of being numerous
And chosen well
And so we must be
Home
And so we must be
Part 4: Being Numerous
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Will you speak before I am gone? Will I prove already too late?
In a strange room
Home.
Ochre
music by Caroline Shaw
text from various sources
A note from the composer:
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 “Wanderers 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. I have been inspired by the work of Heidi Gustafson, an artist and ochre specialist. From her Dust to Dust: A Geology of Color:
Humans are themselves displays of complex sedimentary process. “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 others elements. Dust to dust.
I. Siderite (wordless)
II. Limonite
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 the fluent heat began
And grew to seeming random forms
The seeming prey of cyclic storms
Till at last arose the man.
—Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118
III. Maghemite
Scarpèd cliff and quarried stone
—Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 56
IV. Magnetite (wordless)
V. Hematite
Mille regretz, que vous abandonner
Et d’eslonger…
Qu’on me verra [brief mes jours definer.]
My brief days…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
VI. Vivianite
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
VII. Goethite
hear hush still quiet sleep
now you all wait soon
We are grateful to those who make The Crossing possible.
The Crossing
Dario Amador-Lage
Kelly Ann Bixby
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw
Aryssa Burrs
Sam Grosby
Michaël Hudetz
Steven Hyder
Lauren Kelly
Anika Kildegaard
Zac Kurzenberger
Chelsea Lyons
Elijah McCormack
Benjamin Perri
Olivia Prendergast
Daniel Schwartz
Rebecca Siler
Elisa Sutherland
Daniel Taylor
Jackson Williams
Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, associate conductor
Chuck Foster, collaborative pianist
Present Music
Benjamin Russell, violin
Adrien Zitoun, cello
Jennifer Clippert, flute
William Helmers, clarinet & bass clarinet
John Orfe, piano
Alexander Weir, percussion 1
Douglas Perkins, percussion 2, conductor (Wiancko)
Eric Segnitz, artistic director
Marta Troicki, managing director
Dan Petry, development strategist
Our 2025-2026 season artwork is by Caroline Bergstrøm Scheibel.
Join us for all of our 2025-2026 Season:
Of being numerous
December 19-21 | Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor
The Crossing @ Christmas 2025
Philadelphia and New York City
January 29 & 31 | To Provide New Guards
The Crossing @ Boston Symphony Orchestra
David Lang’s poor hymnal (abridged version)
February 25 | Rectitude
Harold Meltzer’s You Are Who I Love
w/ Sandbox Percussion
Stanford University
March 21-24 | Declare the Causes
music of Tania León, Wang Lu, and Ayanna Woods
Hershey, PA // Philadelphia // Carnegie Hall
March 26-28 | A Candid World
Davia Lang’s poor hymnal
Peace Center, Greenville, SC // Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, TN
