A few years ago, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts asked me to dream up a project that could happen outside. Almost everything I write assumes a controlled space — even the opera I set in a train station reached its audience through headphones. So the invitation pushed me somewhere I hadn’t been.

Christopher Cerrone in rehearsal for The Only Way Is Through with Sandbox Percussion and members of the Young People's Chorus of New York City
In rehearsal for The Only Way Is Through, with Sandbox Percussion and members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

The Only Way Is Through takes its title from Robert Frost’s “A Servant to Servants,” in which a woman worn down by domestic repetition observes that the best way out is always through. I’d meant to set the whole poem. Instead the words became a mantra — something I whisper to myself late at night when I’m overwhelmed.

I’ve been writing my way through the first year of becoming a father, obsessed with the daily challenges of sleep, food, the basics. In a sense I’m saturated. This is the piece where I zoomed out and tried to connect that, conceptually, to the saturation everyone seems to be experiencing now — one moment of chaos into the next, political instability worldwide, a pandemic. I wanted to write something that moves forward rather than back.

There are very few words in the piece. It runs forty-five minutes for choir and percussion quartet, and the phrase itself takes almost twenty of them to assemble, one word at a time.

Sandbox Percussion are among my closest friends and collaborators; we made Don’t Look Down together, which won a Grammy in February. They’re joined by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, conducted by Francisco Núñez and directed by Mary Birnbaum, for the premiere at Caramoor on July 19 at 4:00pm, in the Sunken Garden. It’s free, and there’s a pre-concert conversation with me and Sandbox at 3:00. The show happens rain or shine.

Two weeks later it travels west, to the Music Academy of the West’s Percussion Fellows and Sing! Children’s Chorus, conducted by Erin McKibben and directed by Madison Jackson — July 31 in Anne’s Garden, and August 1 at the Santa Barbara Public Library.

Tickets and details for all three performances, plus the program note and a look at the score: The Only Way Is Through