Thunder/Perfect Mind

Commissioned by the CBC, Thunder: Perfect Mind was written to fill out the time on a proposed CD featuring Eleanor James singing two of my other works for voice and orchestra, both written for her: Letters from Mignon and the orchestral version of the Minnelieder.

The text of Thunder: Perfect Mind comes from a papyrus discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. It is a revelation discourse delivered in the first person by a female theurgist. The tone is forceful throughout and full of deliberate antitheses and paradoxes, viz.: 'I am the whore and the holy one, I am the wife and the virgin.' The text also contains exhortations to hear and reflect on these antitheses, revealing that the narrator believes herself to be, and wants us to believe her to be, a seer intimate with all the incomprehensible forces of the cosmos. This seemed to be a perfect text for the dramatic voice of Eleanor James, and I wrote the piece quickly, finishing it just in time for her return to Canada. R. Murray Schafer