The Book of Never, winner of a 2024 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, is a choral exhortation based on the ancient Novgorod Codex – a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. owned by a monk who was sent as a missionary from Kyiv to the city of Novgorod (later annexed by Russia in 1478) and subsequently excommunicated for combining Pagan ritual with Orthodox Christianity. To save his culture, he poured layer after layer of wax over the book on which to write his liturgy, his alphabet, searing retaliations, and visions of the apocalypse.

Helgeson weaves the Novgorod Codex with fragments of text by twentieth century writers in various states of exile including Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, Thanhha Lai, and The Rolling Stones. These are juxtaposed with ancient hymns stripped of their words and placed inside simulations of infinitely-large imaginary cathedrals, their endless reverberations transcribed by the composer into massive choral harmonies, creating a work that is both timeful and timeless in its urgent cries across ages and continents…far from home.

The program pairs The Book of Never with portions of Gavin Bryars’ new work The Last Days of Immanuel Kant that sets excerpts from Thomas De Quincey’s entertaining, sorrowful, and often humorous essay on the 18th-century German philosopher. The father of transcendental idealism, Kant spent his final days writing on the metaphysics of space and time in his birthplace of Königsberg, known now as Kaliningrad after being taken by Russia after World War II.

In 2024, Kaliningrad’s governor Anton Alikhanov dubiously blamed Kant’s support of representational democracy for Russia’s current war against Ukraine, saying that “Kant has an almost direct relationship to the global chaos that we are facing now” and that his “godlessness and lack of higher values” led to the “sociocultural situation” of Western democracy that post-soviet Ukraine was founded on.