Awakening spring with myth, ritual and a living score at Opus 40
Threshold by Candlelight, part of the Lesser Mysteries event series, at Tempo in Kingston. Photo by: Tom Krueger
Q+A with artist/composer Kelli Scarr
After a long, snowy winter and less than spring-like temperatures last week, the sun is starting to feel a bit warmer, the hummingbirds are making their return and the viburnum outside my window is now in full bloom, its aroma an overwhelming welcome with the slightest gust of wind.
“It’s the season of emergence. Of noticing what is beginning, and what wants to be born through us,” says Hudson Valley-based artist and composer Kelli Scarr.
Scarr calls spring “the perfect container” to explore the collective reemergence, and has been offering events throughout the early weeks of the season to offer ways to reconnect and reorient ourselves through ritual, music and shared experiences. The event series, Lesser Mysteries, shaped by Scarr in collaboration with mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla and ritualist Mary Evelyn Pritchard, will culminate under the Full Moon at Opus 40 on Friday night, as Scarr creates a living score with Moonraker, who hasn’t performed in concert in over two decades.
“It’s not about delivering a message,” Scarr says. “It’s about opening a field. If someone leaves with even a slightly clearer sense of their place within what’s unfolding, that feels important.”
Read our Q+A with Scarr below, and find tickets for all of this week’s upcoming Lesser Mystery events, here.
HVNY: Can you tell us a little bit about Lesser Mysteries, and how the spring season plays a role in the work?
Kelli Scarr (KS): Lesser Mysteries is a springtime initiation into a larger cycle of transformation. The name comes from the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were sacred rites in ancient Greece that honored the cycle of life, death, and rebirth through the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In that tradition, initiates first gathered in the spring for the Lesser Mysteries, a time of purification and orientation before entering the deeper ceremonies, the Greater Mysteries, in the fall.
This project extends that lineage into the present, asking: What would an Eleusinian Mysteries for our time look like? Spring becomes the perfect container for that question. It’s the season of emergence. Of noticing what is beginning, and what wants to be born through us. Lesser Mysteries invites people to step into these questions together.
HVNY: There have been several preceding events, including an at-capacity Threshold by Candlelight offering at Tempo in Kingston last week, how was that experience, and how do these events lead into the greater themes of Lesser Mysteries?
KS: Threshold by Candlelight was incredibly moving. Inspired by years of attending Compline at Trinity Church in New York City, I invited the Mid-Hudson Valley Threshold Choir to co-create a simple, candlelit offering to tend personal and collective grief. Participants were invited to bring a photograph or small object connected to what they’re carrying to contribute to a shared altar. There was a palpable tenderness. At one point we were singing, “We are all just walking each other home,” and you could really feel the truth of that land. It was a reminder of how powerful something very simple can be.
Each of the events in this series opens a different doorway into the same inquiry. The Green Burial workshop invited us to reimagine death as a creative force. The weekend with our mythologist, Catherine Svehla, explored the heroine’s journey through Psyche and Eros.
This Wednesday, April 29, Svehla will be offering a talk on what she calls “the problem of the return” which asks a very real question: after a transformative experience, how do we come back? How do we live what we’ve touched?
And then on Thursday, April 30, we move into Seeds for a Living Score, an open rehearsal where people can witness the music taking shape before it’s activated at Opus 40.
All of it is in service of preparing the ground, individually and collectively, for the culminating experience.
HVNY: You’re creating a living score with Moonraker, who hasn’t played a concert in over 20 years – what has that process been like so far?
KS: It’s been surprisingly easy and a bit surreal. Last year we decided to book a recording session at the Outlier Inn over the winter, and at the time I wasn’t consciously connecting it to this project. But once we started playing, something clicked. The music sounded like what I had been hearing for the Spring Mysteries. Hypnotic, joyful, alive.
There wasn’t much talking. We just dropped back into a shared language. To have that kind of musical rebirth with some of my oldest collaborators, and to bring it into this setting, feels incredibly meaningful.
HVNY: How do you expect Opus 40 to play a role in the performance?
KS: We really couldn’t imagine a more perfect place. Like Widow Jane, Opus 40 was once a site of extraction that has been transformed, through decades of creative devotion, into a cultural sanctuary. That arc of transformation feels deeply aligned with the heart of this work.
I don’t want to reveal too much, but I will say that Opus 40 is not a backdrop. It’s an active participant in the ritual :)
It also feels especially meaningful that we’re gathering during the 50th anniversary of Harvey Fite’s passing, honoring the life and devotion that shaped what we’re stepping into together.
HVNY: What do you hope to cultivate with the audience during this experience?
KS: A sense of aliveness. And connection. We are living through a moment where many of the structures we’ve relied on are no longer holding. There’s a lot that is ending. And also a lot that is trying to be born.
We take our cue from myth and leave space for people to make their own meaning. It’s not about delivering a message. It’s about opening a field. If someone leaves with even a slightly clearer sense of their place within what’s unfolding, that feels important.
HVNY: Who, do you think, would benefit from exploring Lesser Mysteries?
KS: It would benefit people who are looking for a more communal way to be with what’s happening in their lives and in the world right now. It’s also for anyone who wants to mark the arrival of spring the way our ancestors once did, through music, movement, and shared experience. You don’t need any background in ritual or mythology. Just a willingness to show up with curiosity and participate.
I love to share that my plumber and my yoga teacher were both there last year. We’re creating a space where we remember how not separate we are.
HVNY: Are there plans for more Greater/Lesser Mysteries in the future?
KS: Yes! We’re so excited to be returning to the cave at Widow Jane Mine this fall, the last weekend of September. And the intention is to continue building this as an ongoing cycle, at least two major seasonal arcs in Spring and Fall each year, with other offerings woven throughout. Greater Mysteries is starting to take on a life of its own, and we feel honored to be in service to that.
For tickets, visit https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/20260501-the-lesser-mysteries-at-opus--40
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