About the Artwork:
Mary and Elizabeth
Bryn Gillette
December 2011
Oil on board
8 x 30 in.   

Artist Bryn Gillette started this painting during a Walnut Hill Community Church Sunday evening worship service on December 18, 2011. He returned the next day to complete the painting. He describes his process, saying, “I like how this figure expresses the wonder and worship of both Mary and Elizabeth in this short Biblical account of their interaction. For those who look for literal one-to-one meaning in my work, they will find that I am intentionally striving NOT to paint too firmly one single interpretation, but instead trying to convey the spirit of a moment or a place, the unseen spiritual dimension unfolding behind the physical reality. I find that the Truth of a moment transcends the look of the actual location or people, and can communicate more universally when it is not limited to outward appearances.”

About the Artist:
Bryn Gillette is a painter and art teacher defined by his identity as an “ambassador of Jesus Christ, a husband, and a father.” He finished seven years as a full-time art, photography, and Bible teacher at Trinity-Pawling School in 2017, and has recently moved with his wife and four children to North Carolina to become the high school art teacher at Charlotte Christian School. He is the co-founder of TeamOne:27, a nonprofit dedicated to serving the needs of Haitian orphans, and has spent much of his artistic time as an advocate and champion of the needs of Haiti. The unique blend of Bryn’s Spirit-filled posture, realistic and abstract painting style, articulate speaking, and remarkably fast live painting process have made his work highly sought out by church communities, private collectors, and organizations.
https://www.bryngillette.com/

About the Music:
“The Babe Leaped in Womb” from the opera-oratorio El Niño

El Niño is an opera-oratorio by the contemporary American composer John Adams. It was premiered on December 15, 2000, at the Théatre du Chatelet in Paris by soloists Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Willard White, the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, the London Voices, La Maîtrise de Paris, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, with Kent Nagano conducting. Described as a "nativity oratorio,” it retells the Christmas story, with the first half focusing on Mary's thoughts before the birth in the stable in Bethlehem, and the second half covering the aftermath of the birth, Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the early life of Jesus. The text follows the traditional biblical story but also incorporates the Wakefield Mystery Plays, Martin Luther's Christmas Sermon, the Gospel of Luke, and several gnostic gospels from the Apocrypha. Also included are poems by Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Rubén Darío, librettist Peter Sellars, and Adams himself. He also quotes Gabriela Mistral's "The Christmas Star" and incorporates a choral setting of "O quam preciosa" by Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o_(opera)

Lyrics:
And Mary said, Behold the
handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to thy word.
And the angel departed from her.
And Mary arose in those days,
and went into the hill country
with haste, into a city of Judah;
And entered the house of Zacharias;
and saluted Elisabeth.
And it came to pass, that,
when Elisabeth heard the salutation
of Mary, the babe leaped in the womb;
and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
And she spoke out with a loud voice,
and said, Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
For, lo, as soon as the voice
of thy salutation sounded in mine
ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.
And blessed is she that believed:
for there shall be a performance
of those things which
were told her from the Lord.

About the Performers:
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Theatre of Voices, London Voices, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (performer), Dawn Upshaw (performer), Willard White (performer) and Kent Nagano (conductor)

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO) is a German broadcast orchestra based in Berlin. The orchestra performs its concerts principally in the Philharmonie Berlin. The orchestra was founded in 1946 by American occupation forces as the RIAS Symphony Orchestra (“Radio in the American Sector”). Since it was founded, the orchestra has become recognized around the world. Famous music directors have shaped the first seven decades of its history: Ferenc Fricsay, Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Chailly, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Kent Nagano, Ingo Metzmache, and Tugan Sokhiev. The association of many years with top-class guest conductors such as James Conlon, Manfred Honeck, Ton Koopman, Sir Roger Norrington, Sakari Oramo, Leonard Slatkin, and David Zinman has contributed to the orchestra’s renown, as does regular collaboration with Kent Nagano, now the honorary conductor, and the other former music directors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Symphonie-Orchester_Berlin
https://www.dso-berlin.de/en/orchestra/about-the-dso/biography/

Theatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by Paul Hillier in 1990 while he was teaching at the University of California, Davis. Theatre of Voices was created as an avenue to performing more contemporary music while his other group, the Hilliard Ensemble, focused primarily on early music. Originally based in the United States, members of the group originated from both the United States and England. After Hillier's move to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2003, membership in the group became more international, with members drawn from Denmark, Poland, England, and the United States. Today the ensemble’s focus is on new music, though very often interwoven with various kinds of early music, reflecting Hillier’s lifelong devotion to these two ends of the musical spectrum. Together Hillier and Theatre of Voices have enjoyed close collaborations with numerous composers and instrumental ensembles including: Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, John Cage, the Kronos Quartet, John Adams, Karlheinz Stockhausen, London Sinfonietta, Phantasm, Concerto Copenhagen, the Smith Quartet, Meta4 String Quartet, and many more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Voices
https://theatreofvoices.com/about-tov/

London Voices is a London-based choral ensemble founded by Terry Edwards in 1973. In its early years, it also incorporated the London Opera Chorus and London Sinfonietta Voices and Chorus. In 2004, Ben Parry (musician) became co-director of the ensemble and in 2021 the director and manager. Parry is artistic director of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and assistant director of music at King's College, Cambridge. London Voices has been involved in many performances, recordings of operas, and CD and film soundtracks, including The Hobbit, Hunger Games, the prequel trilogy of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, The Iron Lady, Enemy at the Gates, La Traviata, and The Passion of the Christ. They have recorded with such diverse artists as Luciano Pavarotti, Dave Brubeck, Sir Paul McCartney, Queen, Deaf Havana, and have performed in concert venues all over the world, including in London, Aldeburgh, Birmingham, Paris, New York, Shanghai, Jordan, and Lucerne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Voices
https://www.london-voices.com/

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (1954–2006) was an American mezzo-soprano. She was noted for her performances of both Baroque-era music and contemporary works. Her career path was unconventional—formerly a professional violinist, Lieberson did not shift her full-time focus to singing until she was in her thirties. In 2007, she posthumously received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance for a recording of Rilke Songs, written by her husband, Peter Goddard Lieberson, and in 2008 won again posthumously for a performance of her husband's Neruda Songs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hunt_Lieberson

Dawn Upshaw (b.1960) is an American soprano. The recipient of several Grammy Awards, she performs both opera and art songs from the Baroque to contemporary. Many composers, including Henri Dutilleux, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho, have written for her. She has premiered more than twenty-five new works. In 2007, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She tours regularly with pianist Gilbert Kalish. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees and Honoris Causa from Yale University, the Manhattan School of Music, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Allegheny College.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Upshaw
https://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2018/8/Features/The_Teaching_Artist.html

Willard White (b. 1946), a Jamaican-born British operatic bass baritone, grew up in Jamaica and began to learn music by listening to the radio and singing Nat King Cole songs. He was also inspired by the American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. White was a founding member of the Jamaica Folk Singers, sang with the Jamaica Amateur Operatic Society, and trained at the Jamaican School of Music. In 1977, the first stereo recording of Porgy and Bess, in which White sang the role of Porgy, received a Grammy Award. In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and he was made a Knight Bachelor in the 2004 Birthday Honours. In 2000, White was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit (OM), the third-highest honour in the Jamaican honours system, for eminent international distinction in the performing arts.
https://www.intermusica.co.uk/artist/Sir-Willard-White
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_White

Kent Nagano (b. 1951) is a renowned conductor known for interpretations of clarity, elegance, and intelligence. He is at home in music of the classical, romantic, and contemporary eras, introducing concert and opera audiences throughout the world to new and rediscovered music. Since September 2006 he has been music director of Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and he became artistic advisor and principal guest conductor of Gothenburg Symphony in 2013. In September 2015, Nagano took the position of general music director of the Hamburg State Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra. As a much-sought-after guest conductor, Nagano has worked with most of the world’s finest orchestras, including the Vienna, Berlin, and New York Philharmonics, Chicago Symphony, Dresden Staatskapelle, and Leipzig Gewandhaus.
https://www.kentnagano.com/

About the Composer/Lyricist:
John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947) is one of America’s most admired composers. His compositions, both classical music and opera, have strong roots in minimalism. His works include Harmonielehre (1985), Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003), and Shaker Loops (1978), a minimalist four-movement work for strings. His operas include Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. The Death of Klinghoffer is a controversial opera for which he wrote the music, and it is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985 and the hijackers' murder of wheelchair-bound sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. El Niño is an opera-oratorio by Adams that premiered in 2000 at the Théatre du Chatelet in Paris by soloists Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Willard White, the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, the London Voices, La Maîtrise de Paris, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, with Kent Nagano conducting. Described as a "nativity oratorio," it retells the Christmas story, with the first half focusing on Mary's thoughts before the birth in the stable in Bethlehem, and the second half covering the aftermath of the birth, Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the early life of Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(composer)
https://www.earbox.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o_(opera)

About the Poet:
Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) was one of the most distinguished, decorated, and beloved poets of her time. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 and was the first African-American female recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. Ms. Clifton received many additional honors throughout her career, including the Discovery Award from the New York YW/YMHA Poetry Center, a 1976 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for the television special Free to Be You and Me, a Lannan Literary Award in 1994, and the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2010. Her honors and awards give testa­ment to the universality of her unique and resonant voice. In 1987, she became the first author to have two books of poetry—Good Woman and Next—chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She was also the author of eighteen children’s books and in 1984 received the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association for her book Everett Anderson’s Good-bye.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lucille-clifton

About the Devotion Author:
Dr. Jamie Sanchez
Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies
Program Director, Ph.D. Intercultural Studies
Biola University

Jamie Sanchez is an Associate Professor, the Chair of the Graduate Department, and Program Director in Cook School of Intercultural Studies at Biola University. Her research focuses on ethnopolitics in Asia and critical refugee studies.