The Crossing

OUT NOW: Aaron Helgeson’s The Book of Never on Navona Records

Today, we release our 41st album as we observe Juneteenth – a day that reminds us we must stand up to and end oppression.

This is music that carefully examines histories of oppressions of culture; specifically, the strange world of Novgorod, in the land of modern Ukraine.

While we just celebrated A Hundred Years On at The Highmark Mann Center, we now turn to a Thousand-Year-Old Story, as related to us in the Novgorod Codex. History repeating, and repeating.

Mirroring the layers upon layers of writing in the Codex, Aaron weaves together fragments:
desperate attempts of a monk to preserve the culture of a community strangled by authoritarian rulers, words of defiant authors and artists from across eras – Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, Gertrude Stein, Thanhhà Lại, Holocaust survivor André Singer, The Rolling Stones –
fragments of early Slavonic hymnody.

Timely?
(Sigh.) Yes.
As we tell the stories of our time,
and watch history repeat itself.

Aaron’s music is thoughtful, compelling, driven.
It says, stand up.
It says, we endure.

Album #41.
More coming.
Stay tuned.

PARMA Recordings Paul Vazquez
Album artwork Steven Bradshaw

This album was made possible through the generous support of Carol Westfall, Christina Gryc, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and New Music USA’s Creator Fund in 2025-26.

The Book of Never was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University with generous support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago.

TONIGHT ✨ Join us for the world premiere of A Hundred Years On: A New Oratorio about the 1876 Centennial Exposition with The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Crossing! Gates 6:00PM • Showtime 8:00PM • All tickets $18.76 or $50 🎟️

Commissioned by Highmark Mann; composed by Peter Boyer; libretto by Mark Campbell; major support provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from America250PA, National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, and Wyncote Foundation.

Dito is gone. There is and was only one Dito, and we join the arts community of Philadelphia and far beyond in grieving the loss of a superstar, a deeply gifted artist, a profoundly funny human, and a friend to anyone who ever met him. We were the fortunate planets in his orbit when he joined The Crossing for Knee Plays in 2020 at , taking that show from an idea to a meaningful, playful, rich experience for us and everyone who was there. Love abounded then; love abounds today, though in sadness. Thank you, Dito, Martha, friend, forever opening our eyes.