Mysterious mountain

A vision of a man walking up a mountain, and a collaboration that got gloriously out of hand, promise to push Saturday´s Lansing Symphony concert into exciting new territory.

Well-known music by Elgar and Mozart is on the docket, but the night´s most striking feature is a large-scaled, luminous new work with deep local roots: “Seven Ascents for Flute and Orchestra,” by MSU-based composer Marjan Helms with LSO principal flutist Richard Sherman as soloist.

“Seven Ascents” is no perfunctory nod to local talent. It´s a meditative braid of lyrical melodies clocking in at some 45 minutes.

Both Helms and Sherman said that working together on the music has changed their lives.

By the end last year´s premiere of “Seven Ascents” with the Jackson Symphony Orchestra, Sherman was trembling.

“I was so choked up in the third movement that I could barely play,” Sherman said.

They seem awed and surprised by the major work that came out of their close collaboration.

“I feel like I´m the herald of something,” Sherman said. “Melodies that have never been heard before — I get to share them with people.”

Muffitt was so impressed by the piece that he went out on a limb and programmed it, even though it´s the longest work the symphony will play all year.

“This is a very beautiful and expansive work with a great sense of spirituality,” Muffitt said. “You sense there is a deep program behind it.”

The maestro isn´t kidding. The genesis of the music involved more than a few real-life ascents.

Helms is a founding faculty member of MSU´s Community Music School, where she is composer-in-residence and head of the piano program.

At an MSU Symphony concert 10 years ago, she was amazed by Sherman´s passionate performance of Christopher Rouse´s flute concerto. She emailed Sherman that night.

“I thanked him for reminding me why I went into music in the first place,” she said.

Large-scaled works for flute and orchestra are few.

“A few years ago I would have thought it was crazy to write something like this,” Helms said.

But Helms was deeply impressed by Sherman´s intensity and musicianship. More important, they shared an unabashed love of spirituality in music.

“There´s a real spiritual dimension in (´Seven Ascents´) that´s unusual for flute,” Sherman said. “A lot of the stuff that´s for flute is too virtuosic, too many notes.”

The Jackson Symphony agreed to commission the piece from Helms, with Sherman as soloist. Helms spent about a year thinking about the “spiritual world” she wanted to explore. At first, she envisioned music inspired by verses from several different mystical traditions.

But Helms was finding her first idea too forced.

“I was coming up with mush,” Helms said. “It was not coherent.”

Suddenly, a series of crystal clear images came to her, unbidden, during meditation.

The first time it happened, she had a vision of a man walking up the side of a mountain.

“He was moving so intrepidly, not slowing down, not running, but not meandering,” Helms said. “The energy — I really have to admit that it´s a lot like Rick.”

She went outside and walked the pace she had seen in her mind, clocked it, set a metronome to it and boom — that was the tempo for the first movement.

“I jettisoned everything I had planned to that point,” she said. “I met with (Jackson Symphony Music Director) Steve Osmond and Rick and told them, ‘Here it is.’”

The man on the mountain, and subsequent visions, inspired music that is deeply personal to Helms, but she hopes listeners will interpret the music in their own way. She was hesitant to even talk about the visions, for fear of limiting the listener´s own imagination.

But Helms has a reason for lifting the veil on her creative process. Unlike many of her fellow composers, she considers visual imagery in music “not only legitimate, but to be desired,” for creator and listener alike.

“People learn to be ashamed of wandering and exploration,” she said. “They think they´re supposed to be listening for the secondary theme coming around for the 14th time.”

If she does her job right, she said, listeners will lose themselves in the music and not look for “street signs.”

As work on the concerto went on, Sherman and Helms began emailing and texting at all hours of the night. Sherman couldn´t believe the gift Helms was giving him.

“The flute writing is so lyrical,” Sherman said. “Just when I thought there was one tune that was gorgeous, there´s another one and another one.”

They talked about poetry, literature, how to draw the line between emotion and sentimentality and even which flute Sherman should play.

“We´ve become very close,” Sherman said. Even after the Jackson premiere last fall, Helms and Sherman got together for intense tweaking sessions.

“We´d do detail work for hours,” she said. “We´d look at the slurs, exactly where the breaths are, where you speed up or slow down. These are tiny cells or building blocks, but whatever is behind all that is holy.”

There is a steamroller inevitability about Saturday´s Lansing performance. Each year, Muffitt gives a solo turn to one of the firstchair musicians, and 2015 was going to be Sherman´s year anyway.

“Rick is such a dynamic and engaging performer, I wanted to find something that would harness that energy,” Muffitt said. The elephant in the room, “Seven Ascents,” was impossible to ignore.

Besides, accounts from several knowledgeable sources, all of whom prefer to remain nameless, hint that the Jackson Symphony left something to be desired at last fall´s premiere.

Helms and Sherman are ecstatic to share their momentous musical discovery with their home town.

Helms compared their collaboration to gazing at a sunset that “takes your breath away.”

“There´s something doubly wonderful about having somebody else there,” Helms said. “That´s how I felt with Rick. Our eyes are on something beyond us, a mystery we both truly honor.”

Enigma Variations

Lansing Symphony Orchestra Richard Sherman, flute $15-50 8 p.m. Saturday, March 7 Wharton Center 750 E. Shaw Lane, East Lansing (517) 487-5001, lansingsymphony.org