The hillsides of Cincinnati are strewn with slabs of flat, gray rock, fragments of compressed sediment that once floored a shallow sea. The slabs often feature fossils of the little shell-dwellers who called this region home, millions of years ago.

Millions of years later, eager to adorn our courtyard — our precious green space in the heart of the city (see photo below) — with standing flower beds, I clambered up and down those hillsides, dodging the poison ivy, and lugged scores of slabs to my pick-up truck, drove ‘em home and arranged 'em into knee-high walls. I lay the slabs with the richest displays of fossils on the topmost layer of the walls, so that the fossils could be seen and enjoyed.

Enjoyed by whom? Me. I love looking at them. They are shapely, translucent; none larger than the circle we make by touching forefinger to thumb. They prompt me to ponder the lives of those ancient shellfish, so brief, simple and circumscribed.

What did those shellfish do with what little energy they possessed? What did they figure out about the universe? The answers are not arcane. They ate, grew, bred and died. They knew the Great Opposites: light and dark, hungry and full, alive and dead.

Nothing of them remains. The fossils are not their shells; their shells are long gone. The fossils are merely impressions of their shells, petrified, cast in rock.

The 12th century wise man known as Guigo the Carthusian conceived of the ceaseless unfolding of the Universe as a great song perpetually sung by what he called The Wisest Singer. Guigo observed how each and every entity of the universe clings tenaciously to the single brief syllable of that song during which it exists.

A generation after Guigo, St. Francis preached to the birds of Tuscany. Had Guigo been inclined to admonish the Carthusian shellfish, cousins of those creatures whose fossils adorn my stone walls, he would doubtless have used the same words he imparted to us, his fellow humans:

"You have been clinging to one syllable of a great song,” he would have told those attentive shellfish, "and you are troubled when the Wisest Singer proceeds in singing on. For the syllable you loved is withdrawn and others succeed in order. The Wisest Singer does not sing to you alone, nor at your will. The Wisest Singer sings to all, and only at the Wisest Singer’s will."

In the not too distant future a few broken shards of the CDs of my music will memorialize my own brief, simple, circumscribed existence just as the fossils in my garden wall memorialize those primordial shellfish.

Like them, I’ve known some light and some darkness, some yearning and some fulfillment. I’ve managed a little more travel than they did but, relative to the vastness of the universe, my travels haven’t amounted to much; I’ve seen precious little.

All those CDs I’ve produced — 16 titles, 20,000 actual CDs and more to come --what do they amount to? Physically, just so much plastic pollution. Soon enough they'll be in landfills or mingling with the sands on the ocean floor.

I read somewhere that in thirty years plastic will occupy more space in the ocean than fish! Our seven seas will never be rendered clean of plastic. Here I am, fancying that I care about our environment, yet happily churning out another thousand CDs, this time featuring my cello music. This Fall, with your permission, I’ll send one to each of you and to every American classical music radio station.

“Ah,” I hear you exclaiming, "but CDs are different than plastic straws or styrofoam coffee cups or plastic thimbles of half-and-half. How are CDs any different? Because they preserve music? because they perpetuate for a few years, the spiritual stuff that dreams are made on? Does the ’spiritual’ content of those CDs justify their pollution of the planet? Future generations will not think so.

How strange to reflect that the shards of the plastic CDs I’ve gone to such trouble and expense to bring into being will, physically, far outlast all memory of me, my life’s work, my music, my world. Two thousand years hence, when the memory of our nation is as remote from the present day as ancient Rome is from this moment, our June of 2018, when all that we have thought and dreamed and made has been utterly forgotten, those smashed shards of my CDs will be “asleep in the deep," along with all the rest of the detritus, most of it as yet unmanufactured, that we humans will subsequently discard and pile on top of what we’ve already thoughtlessly deposited in landfills or cast adrift in oceans.

A shard of a CD will have precisely the same relation to my current self that a fossil has to a long-dead shellfish. It will be a mere impression, cast in all-but-imperishable plastic.

The only response I know to the inarguable truth of that assertion is to invoke the stolid wisdom of old Guigo the Carthusian by setting his words to music.

A text as pithy as Guigo's demands a terse treatment. My setting of his text clocks in at one minute, thirty-nine seconds.

Artistically, as a choral anthem, it is flawed in this respect: it is too short. By repeating the opening phrase I could have brought the anthem closer to the standard length of the genre. But it the very brevity of the piece that IS the point.

The life of a shellfish is short, however long its fossil may endure. The life of a composer is short, however long the endurance of a shard of a CD his music.

To hear The Torrence Singers performing The Wisest Singer under the direction of David Burks, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

A 12th-century wise man known as Guigo the Carthusian conceived of our ceaselessly unfolding Universe as a never ending melody perpetually intoned by what he called The Wisest Singer. Guigo observed how each and every entity of the universe clings tenaciously to its own brief syllable of that vast song.

Written almost a thousand years ago, his words seem contemporary and have an empathic, almost affectionate tone.

"You have been clinging to one syllable of a great song, and you are troubled when the Wisest Singer proceeds in singing on. For the syllable you loved is withdrawn and others succeed in order. But the Wisest Singer does not sing to you alone, nor at your will. The Wisest Singer sings to all, and only at the Wisest Singer’s will."

A text as pithy as Guigo's demands a terse treatment. My setting of his text clocks in at one minute, thirty-nine seconds.

As a choral anthem, it is flawed in this respect: it is too short. I could have made it longer by repeating the opening phrase and the closing phrase. I could have developed fragments of those phrases. I could have inserted a contrasting middle section, the choir oohing ribbons of pure melody to evoke the great never ending song of the Universe. I could have reprised the opening phrase before ending the piece.

But the brevity of Guigo’s paragraph is precisely the point. His sage utterance is quickly over and done with. It’s just one “syllable” in the larger song we are all singing -- and that is “singing” us.

The pathos arises from our awareness that the “syllable” that is our lives -- like my setting of Guigo’s words -- is beautiful and over very quickly, try as we might to prolong it.

I want you to hear The Torrence Singers performing “The Wisest Singer” under the direction of David Burks, but I must apologize in advance for the poor technical quality of the recording. It’s the only recording I have of this little work, so I can only beg you to forgive the technical deficiencies, focusing instead on the artistic content.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.