On North Woods (from Scott Ordway)
We all know the most about the physical and social worlds that are closest to our own. As curiosity or compassion shifts our attention further afield, we know progressively less, and, at some point, we arrive at a place where knowledge fades away completely and is replaced by pure imagination.
This boundary between knowing and unknowing is where many of our best and some of our worst qualities emerge. It is where hatred, prejudice, and fear often originate. But it is also the birthplace of religious imagination, artistic creation, and social progress. In this place, standing at the distant edge of what we know and looking out at the vast expanse of what we do not, we are able to imagine—and sometimes create—a world beyond our own that is better, or more beautiful, or simply different than the one we already have.
Late in the first century, Tacitus (56–120 CE) wrote two histories—Agricola and Germania (both ca. 98 CE)—describing the landscape and culture at the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. He never traveled there himself, instead building his narrative from a wide range of fragmented sources. Unsurprisingly, much of what he wrote was wrong. But where his understanding of the world ended, the magnificence of his imagination began to reveal itself and he gave us an endless ocean, a forest at the edge of creation, and shadows cast upward by the level edge of the earth itself.
His error, and the softly glowing forest world he imagined, are the starting point for North Woods (2014), a work for eight-part treble choir in three movements followed by a short appendix. For me, this imaginative error is not a flaw but a model: mystery and uncertainty can generate new structures of thought, and of sound.
Reading Tacitus, I was drawn to the passages most saturated with his wonder at the strangeness of the imagined idea of the north. They brought to mind Glen Gould’s 1967 radio documentary The Idea of North, another work based on minimal first-hand experience but which addresses an abstract “north” as a place of strangeness and imagination. Tacitus’ descriptions of the landscape are wide-eyed and radiant, as if he is telling us something he himself can’t quite believe: the nights are not dark, the ocean is endless, and shadows don’t behave as they do in the real world.
Most important for me is his observation that “they do not imprison their gods within walls”, an allusion to the pre-Christian forest paganism which then organized life in Northern Europe and which, in an oddly circular turn, resembles how I grew up in Northern California. If there were a higher power anywhere to be found in 1990s Santa Cruz, he or she would probably have been found in the shadowy mountains and canyons of the coastal redwood forest.
This intensive relationship to forests continues to guide me personally, and inspires much of my creative work. I do not romanticize them as picturesque landscapes, and I do not turn to them as a source of national pride—we have done nothing to deserve these trees. Instead, I relate to forests in the same way as Tacitus’ half-real Germans: they are where I go to connect with the world on a deep and irrational level, to make important decisions, and to know who I am. They are where I go to recover myself. This is the sense of the forest that informs my work.
Whether reading Tacitus or walking in the California redwoods, I experience forests as architectural spaces rather than as stories. Instead of narrative, I experience the quality of the light, the texture of the air, and the soft instability of the soil.
In my collaboration with the extraordinary singers of the Lorelei Ensemble, I have sought to create music that reflects this kind of space by drawing on the sonic qualities I value most: light, sonority, clarity, texture, and restraint. I wanted to make a quiet, shared, and sacred acoustic environment that is grounded in careful attention to the resonance and quality of sound itself. Through their artistry, Lorelei has made my imagined space into something real.
The structure of the work is designed to showcase the power, precision, and emotional intensity of treble voices—qualities often lacking in repertoire for soprano and alto choirs. This is a place that only an ensemble like Lorelei—and the many ambitious young singers they now inspire—can go.
In drawing on these qualities, North Woods belongs to a lineage of modern vocal music that is concerned with the construction of sonic environments—spacious architectures of measured resonance in service of ecological and spiritual themes. In the end, what I wanted to make and to share was a generous and detailed acoustic space like the forests in my own life, a place where nothing moves but everything is radiant.
—Scott Ordway, August 2025
On North Woods (from Beth Willer)
Scott Ordway wrote North Woods for Lorelei in 2014 at a time when we were beginning to hone in on who we were as an ensemble and what we had to offer the rich landscape of vocal music already in existence. It is rare for Lorelei to keep a piece in our repertoire for more than 10 years. Why, then, does this piece still have such a hold on us?
North Woods is a work that has defined Lorelei’s sound for many listeners. It is unique in its ability to both capture a part of Lorelei’s past while still fitting us extremely well in the present. It carries with it the memories of the many singers who have lent their voices to its soloistic yet anonymous textures, of the places and spaces that we have offered it to, and of the friendship I hold with a composer who has known Lorelei since almost our very beginning.
We commissioned it, perhaps surprisingly, as part of a “New Americana” program, premiering it alongside works by Joshua Bornfield and Mary Koppel, and early and contemporary shape-note repertoire. I remember discussing the concept from the deck of my parents’ house in Northern Wisconsin, surrounded by white pine and spruce trees, with Scott speaking to me from his new academic post situated in the woods of Maine. We were both interested in creating a piece that represented a vast natural landscape—and particularly the most isolated parts of this landscape—as a snapshot of a distinct American perspective. That perspective is both inherent in me, as a former resident of the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, and something I now must work to remind myself of as a mid-Atlantic city-dweller.
The text by first-century historian Tacitus, particularly the third movement and its awe-struck reverence for the natural world, is that reminder for me:
They do not imprison their gods Within walls, or represent them with Human features;
Instead, they consecrate Woods and groves, And they call by the names gods the Hidden presence that they see only by the eye of reverence.
I have now listened to these words sung by Lorelei so many times that I easily and frequently recall them while I’m walking through the Maryland woods—one of my favorite ways to escape the human-centric world that spins around us. These words remind me of the ways my own definition of the divine and omnipresent have evolved, as has my understanding of what it means to be American. For me, and in this piece, these are not fixed ideas, but rather expansive and inclusive ideas that echo the expanse of this inimitable, boundless natural world that precedes and succeeds each of us in our brief existence.
—Beth
Willer, August 2025