![Jane Sheldon at the piano, vantage point of the image looking over top of the piano strings](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-11/251020Pearlsong28_0.jpg?itok=PFWvi0d3) # Singing The Pearlsong Sung November 04, 2025 [ Jane Sheldon ](/people/jane-sheldon) Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey. *Research Reflections are part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religion.* The CSWR recently commissioned me to write a musical composition setting Adam Bremer-McCollum’s *The Pearlsong* (Harvard University Press, 2025), a new translation from Syriac, made for the Center’s new 4T series. I performed the new piece—*The Pearlsong Sung*—at the book’s recent launch event. In his Foreword to *The Pearlsong*, Charles Stang points out that the ancient text is a case of Henry Corbin’s “visionary recital,” a narrative tale of visionary experience told in the first person. I’m trained as a recitalist of Western classical music. In that tradition, a recitalist performs music that is thematically very diverse, much of which is not sung in the first person. A recitalist in my tradition might also sing opera, as I do, embodying characters *in extremis*. Corbin’s recitalist is different. With his term in view, *The* *Pearlsong Sung* seemed to require a mode of performance outside my usual ways of being on stage. In performance, the recitalist in Corbin’s visionary sense might be more like the storytellers of Iraq’s al-Hakawati tradition, or of Hindu Harikatha, or perhaps like Diane Wolkstein, New York’s official storyteller in the 1960s and 1970s, telling the story of Inanna in the first person with musical accompaniment. So I delivered *The Pearlsong Sung* with gently chanted text, preserving the natural rhythms of speech amid simple pianism to support the recognition of each recurring symbol in the story: no heightened states, no outsized gestures. I sang a man’s story in my feminine voice, opting against timbral changes when voicing the story’s various speakers. In Tom Cheetham’s definition, Corbin’s visionary recital is “an initiation that can only be expressed in symbols and can only be told in the first person.” I mapped each text symbol to a sonic symbol recognizable at each recurrence. The crucial symbol of the pearl was given sonic expression with gentle glissandi, a slide from one pitch to another, along the upper strings of the piano—close to the pegs, for pianists reading. Each time Bremer-McCollum’s “breathy snake” appeared, I drew my fingers along the lowest strings, yielding a kind of growl. The only other piano sounds are occasional, brief sprays of pitches to surround fragments of melody. I made the beautiful Mason and Hamlin piano in Williams Chapel drone beneath the vocal line by activating its strings with e-bows (magnets used by electric guitarists to elicit sustained vibration of a guitar string). These droning pitches, in combination with a field recording of a running creek, served as the landscape or backdrop for the story. I sang the piece standing so I could reach into the piano and so that my voice would be thrown onto the strings, causing them to vibrate in sympathetic resonance, providing a kind of halo around my voice. My performance and compositional decisions were influenced by George Crumb’s *Ancient Voices of Children,* which I recently performed for the 21st Century Consort’s 50th-anniversary concert in Washington, D.C. In this gorgeous piece from 1970, wild glossolalia is sung into the body of the piano, audibly activating the strings. *Ancient Voices of Children*, which sets text by Federico García Lorca, is a dialogue between a woman and a child singer and can be interpreted as a mystical event in which the woman is in communication with her ancient self: *mi alma antigua de niño*. I sang the child’s part in 1998, when I was 15, and last month I sang the woman’s role. This felt as if I was personally entering into the mystical event expressed in the piece itself. The most natural way to perform Crumb’s *Ancient Voices* is to embody the mystical event as if it is happening in the present, like singing an opera role. *The Pearlsong Sung,* in contrast, relates events after the fact, so its speaker is performing an act of recollection in the text. As I wrote *The Pearlsong Sung*, Corbin’s term “visionary recital” brought to mind an encounter I had after singing a concert in a stone church in a valley somewhere outside Rouen, France. The audience was mostly local people, some of them members of the church’s congregation. After the concert, a man came up to me. He was small, with a cowed sort of carriage, but he was quite electrified as he took my hands in his, saying with urgency, “*Vous croyez*.” You believe. He took the manner of my singing, and perhaps my sound itself, as an indication of faith. I was able to reply, “What I believe is that the music has great power.” Among several gifts granted to me during my month at the CSWR is this rich term, “visionary recital,” and its offer of myriad ways to re-examine what it is that I do on stage and how it might be interpreted by the listener. See also:- [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection) - [ Transcendence and Transformation ](/programming-threads/transcendence-and-transformation)