The Brimming Stone

A Musical Pilgrimage and Retreat

Words and Music by Jenni Roditi

Dedicated to Gavin Bryars

Four Songs, Woven as One

The Listening Gong · A Divine Joke · Waves Not Separate from Ocean · The Brimming Stone

Scored for SATB chamber choir*, piano, electronic organ, gong, violin, viola, cello, double bass, improvisers* and speaker

Composed June 2023 – January 2024.

*In the proposed rendition upcoming the Choir will be New London Chamber Choir, conducted by Kieran Morris; the improvisers will be the OffBeat Trio with Special Guest Alistair Smith.

I am currently fundraising for this piece (through an application to Arts Council England) to be recorded and introduced
publicly through an industry preview in October 2027

A long-duration choral-instrumental composition:
the score opens to improvisation at set points: Dovetails and Responses

A Journey Across Ten Thresholds, Held in an Imagined Dedicated Space 
— the House, its Outer Chambers, Inner Chamber & Ground (see the end of this page for more on the House)

New London Chamber Choir agree to record The Brimming Stone

I am delighted that the NLCC has agreed to record the music. I am currently applying for funding to record and present this new work an industry preview. The music producer will be Steve Parr, who produces for Max Richter and Jocelyn Pook. 

This piece is subject to Arts Council England Funding.

3-Minute music sample video for Arts Council England.

This short video demonstrates how improvisation emerges from the ‘Dovetail’ in the score and opens into a ‘Response’ of its own making. At the dashed bar lines, the improvisers draw on the specific chords, mood and rhythm of the passage — precise and harmonically exacting — before opening outward into a response, averaging two and a half minutes, realised for the recording and launch performance by the Offbeat Trio with Special Guest Alistair Smith.
NB: This video shows the score only, without the improvisation added — the clefless stave marks where the response happens, not what is played.

The full score as a Sibelius video

Scoring is SATB choir, piano, electronic organ, large gong, violin, viola, cello, double bass, with speaker and improvisers.

The recording proposal to Arts Council England includes the improvisers as The OffBeat Trio (voice, Jenni, piano, Hayden Parsey, and cello, Kate Shortt) with Special Guest Alistair Smith, harp and gong.

Duration, without extensions into improvisation, is (now arriving at) 45-minutes 56 seconds. The duration with extensions into improvisation is planned at 79 minutes to fit on an 80-minute CD; each improvisation will be up to a maximum of 2.5 minutes.

This score also depicts the places improvisers enter through Dovetails with dashed bar lines in the score. The improvisers continues alone in the Responses – represented in the score by a single clefless bar and stave, with ‘PAUSA’ marked. The ‘dissolve’ bleed-through from the last chord, before the Response, is also depicted. The Speaker’s role has recently developed from a simple recurring mantra to more personal anecdotes and inspirations, delivered by a voice representing the composer.

In this video rendition, the score playback sweeps past the single clefless bar and stave (Response space) without pausing.

FULL SCORE AS PDF
FULL SCORE AS MP3

Dovetails and Responses

Dovetails – where improvisers join the score. Responses – where the score stops, and improvisation takes over. They appear 14 times in the score, as one dissolves into the other.

Dear Jenni

Judith Weir kindly sent me your score, which I’m delighted to pass on to Sofi Jeannin.  We’ll have a look at it and see if we can find the opportunity to perform with the BBC Singers.
With best wishes,
Jonathan
_____________________________________________________
Jonathan Manners | Producer | BBC Singers | BBC Radio 3

31.01.2024

Artists Confirmed

Thank you so much to the New London Chamber Choir for agreeing to sing this music. (Thank you also to Jessica Loeb, who sings in the choir, for suggesting I approach them). Thanks to Nick Holland, cello, who has agreed to lead the string section recording, Huw Warren, who has agreed to record the piano part and Alistair Smith, who has agreed to record the gong part. The electronic organ part will be added with samples. Thanks to Peter Wiegold for agreeing to host the industry preview of the recording at Club Inégales, which will includes live extracts with four soloists from the choir, with piano reduction, and the improvisers. Thanks to Steve Parr who will be the producer.

OffBeat Trio with Special Guest to join recording of Brimming Stone

Offbeat Trio with Special Guest Alistair Smith have agreed to join this recording project; Kate Shortt, cello, Hayden Parsey, piano and Jenni Roditi, voice, will be joined by Alistair Smith, chromatic harp. Offbeat Trio are an improvising trio, formed in 2022 for the Crouch End Festival. Since then they have appeared each year at the festival and recently twice at Jazz Rumours, The Pine, Islington. The ‘dovetails and responses’ within the score invite a group, such as Offbeat, to enter into the world of the score and emerge from it with their own signal-led improvised music. The score has 14 Dovetails and Responses in total — realised in full for this recording, allocating an average of two and a half minutes per Response, across two days in the studio, to fit within one 80-minute CD.

Four Songs, Woven As One: a ‘sub-subtitle’

The ‘songs,’ in order of first appearance –

1. The Listening Gong
2. A Divine Joke
3. The Waves are not Separate from the Ocean 
4. The Brimming Stone 

They all weave together in various flows and forms throughout the piece. 

Song 1, The Listening Gong

A ‘gong-song’ without words. A transformative, healing presence across many traditions, intensifying the music, opening into potential vastness within the responses.

Song 2, La Di Da — Divine Jokes 

Nonsense syllables arising almost by accident, echoing the Tibetan Buddhist teaching of cosmic jokes: life as illusion and play. The Sanskrit meaning in the syllables ‘LA’ ‘DI’ ‘DA’ traces rest, individual calling, and manifestation — bringing one’s true nature into the world.

Song 3, The Waves are not Separate from the Ocean 

A psycho-spiritual metaphor in musical form: the turbulent waves of our lives and the still, vast depths beneath are inseparable — we are both the waves and the ocean.

Song 4, The Brimming Stone 

The title song’s arc moves from ominous, vertiginous ‘moving backwards through the future’ through ascending hope to monumental blocks of sound in ‘This is a Zen map’; ‘Edges slide down’ surrenders into a long, contemplative ‘to prayer’; ‘I am here’ fizzes with trills and runs before ‘not nowhere’ floats in suspension; ‘fissure’ tolls urgently before a dazed ‘blinking’, stutters into life, alongside a spacious ‘breathing’ arrival on ‘new, now’ — and the score yields to silence as the gong dissolves all.

Dame Judith Weir commended The Brimming Stone to the BBC Singers in February 2024 – she said to me in a private conversation at t he time: “this is exactly the sort of piece they are looking for.”

Radio 3 commissioning editor, David Ireland, distributed the full score to all BBC performing groups in February 2025 and said, “I’ve taken the opportunity to forward it to the managers of our performing groups.  If they are interested, and able to take anything further with you, either regarding this piece, or another future commission, they will let me know and we’ll be in touch further.”

‘Brimming Stone’ – where did the phrase come from?

“Out of the brimming stone of fissure…”

The original thought in the poem, which pointed to the feeling that needed to be expressed, was the phrase ‘fire and brimstone’. This became reworked poetically in my imagination into the phrase out of the brimming stone of fissure. That image, of a ‘brimming stone ‘, came only from my poetry. I’d never heard it before and have not found it anywhere since.

Gavin Bryars, March 2024: “To my mind, The Brimming Stone is an extremely fine piece of music, the product of an original and lively musical mind and is something that I would go out of my way to hear.“
Gavin was Jenni’s mentor in the creation stage of this piece, at an artists’ residency in 2023, and the piece is dedicated to him. 

JR writes: I would like to thank and acknowledge opera conductor and vocal coach Alexander Ingram, who was closely involved in the evolution of this score. On seeing the finished score, Alex said, “Top rate! terrific! very ‘now’. It’s what people want to hear. It’s not constructed in the head, but flows from within you.”

The poem that germinated the composition

The Brimming Stone [text set to music]

Moving backwards
Through the future
On my way past now
To arrive
For the first time

This is a Zen map,
The original place
Your original face

Edges slide down,
To prayer
I am here (We are here)
Not, nowhere

I have every human right to live
(You, They, I, We have every human right to live)

Out of the brimming stone of fissure –
Blinking
Breathing
New
Now

June 28th 2023, CAMPFr. Aulus Les Bains, France.

“You can certainly write for voices” – David Wordsworth, conductor, in an email to Jenni.

Modern Composition residency, with Gavin Bryars

The work was conceived in June 2023 at CampFR music artists’ camp, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in France. It was a six day residency with Gavin Bryars, our resident mentor and raconteur.

Thank you, Gavin and the class of ’23!

Angharad Cooper, EU/UK Arts Consultant 2025: “Her forty-year career demonstrates a relentless commitment to vocal innovation, to community, and a blending of tradition with contemporary exploration, establishing her as a distinctive figure in modern composition and new vocal leadership.”

Waves not Separate from Ocean

[The second text set to the music…]

How the piece arose

In June 2023 I began a new journey with my composing, moving on from a nine-year composing silence. Other projects vied for my attention during that ‘silent’ time, and out of this period came the choirs. However, compositionally, I was blocked. 

In October 2022, at a friends-of-the-family dinner, I began to face the situation. One of the guests at the dinner table asked, ‘ – and what do you do?’ To my surprise, I answered, ‘I was a composer.’ The grammar landed heavily in my heart. The guest replied kindly, ‘Surely, once a composer, always a composer?’ 

A few weeks later, by a lucky chance, I saw a call in the Arts Council Arts Jobs listing for a course in the Pyrenees mountains titled ‘Modern Composition’ with Gavin Bryars. Without blinking, I signed up and decided to travel by train through France to get there.

It was the train journey that was partly to blame for the poem! Say no more.

The Parable of the Brimming Stone: Dramatis Personae

In August 2026, Jenni began writing a narrative based on the emotional-spiritual journey of the piece, discovering a cast of characters living within the music.

• Celebrants—the choir: celebrate, empathise, contemplate, and shape the narrative
• Pilgrims — the improvisers: the ones on the ‘musical pilgrimage and retreat’ – exploring the many expressions of the celebrants, joining with and responding to them throughout
• Artisans — the instrumentalists: guide, underpin and respond to the narrative of the Celebrants and Pilgrims
• Speaker — a spoken voice that breaks into ‘the telling’ at moments, carrying the composer‘s own anecdotes and inspirations
• Ancestors — the audience: silent witnesses who participate internally, and who generate attention that affects all participants
• Stewards — silent helpers, who discreetly move things along and are of service to the whole
  

The Ten Thresholds in the Parable of The Brimming Stone

Act One, The Grounds and Outer Chambers of the House

1. Ceremonial Waves (bars 1–142)
2. Lost and Found (bars 143–247)
3. Peace and Riot (bars 248–351)
4. Mind Shot, Earth Shot (bars 352–408)
5. No Time Like the Present (bars 409–486)

Act Two, Inner Chamber of the House 

6. Inside the Loving Hammock (bars 487–598)
7. Revelation and Dissolution (bars 598–691)
8. I Am Here, then Not Here (bars 693–802)
9. Ambiguity and Fissures (bars 803–952)
10. Grounding and Waking Up (bars 953–1062)

On speaking with an architect friend, James Mills, about my ‘imagined dedicated space’ where the parable will unfold, I was clear it would be based on hexagons. The next day he sent me this drawing. What was, for me, some kind of mythical mix of private residence and performance space for retreat and musical transmission — had turned into a performance space, plain and simple!

He called it Brimming Stone House, which tickled me; maybe it should be Brimming Stone Performance House.

You can see where he’s erased the bedrooms, living room and kitchen and replaced it all with seating!

I have imagined bedrooms for 12 people on the left and right hexagons of the HALL. Then, opposite the HALL, across from the STAGE, which I was calling the inner chamber (or sanctuary), I saw a tea-room and a library. To the right of the library, a kitchen; and to the left of the tea-room, a bathroom and shower facility.

The entrance through the hall with a back door exit from the tea-room library. There is a porch extension to the front and back entrances. Underneath the back porch is a secret hollow.

Outside are the grounds, where the fires are lit and where some grounds are being cultivated, and others remain simpler, and some are rough. The whole thing surrounded by woodland.