The Incredulity of St Thomas

But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didy­mus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other dis­ci­ples there­fore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Ex­cept I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my fin­ger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not be­lieve. — John 20 : 24–25

This story ap­peals to me be­cause it pre­sents a small vi­gnette on doubt and ques­tion­ing. De­spite being em­bed­ded in the cult of Jesus, Thomas re­fuses to be­lieve in Jesus’s res­ur­rec­tion with­out ev­i­dence: he in­sists on his own phys­i­cal re­al­ity and ques­tions the views of his clos­est friends. This ques­tion­ing seems to me to be an im­por­tant part of how one might ap­proach the world and live in it.

I have pre­vi­ously set out to write music with lit­er­ary or philo­soph­i­cal grains of in­spi­ra­tion de­spite the im­pos­si­bil­ity of es­tab­lish­ing a di­rect cor­re­la­tion for the lis­tener be­tween a per­formed mu­si­cal ex­pe­ri­ence and the myr­iad con­no­ta­tions made and thought­ways taken dur­ing the writ­ing process. To adapt Gas­ton Bachelard’s analy­sis of the poet and their image to the com­poser and their ma­te­r­ial: ‘The com­poser does not con­fer the past of their ma­te­r­ial upon me, and yet their ma­te­r­ial im­me­di­ately takes root in me. Ma­te­ri­als ex­cite us — af­ter­wards — but they are not the phe­nom­ena of an ex­cite­ment’ (The Po­et­ics of Space, 1969, p.​xvii). I am not sure I can en­tirely say why this has proved a fruit­ful para­dox to pur­sue for me, but given the im­pos­si­bil­ity in­her­ent in it, I might com­pare the writ­ing process to run­ning to­wards a place that does not exist, and that which re­sults — the music — to the dust thrown into the air by my heels.

The In­credulity of St Thomas was writ­ten for per­for­mance by the Talea En­sem­ble at the Har­vard Sum­mer Com­po­si­tion In­sti­tute, Au­gust 2012. I am grate­ful to the Solti Foun­da­tion for sup­port­ing my par­tic­i­pa­tion in this pro­ject.