A work more ambitious than anything outside his operas: Pilgrimage, is a twenty-minute, five-movement solo cantata on serious biblical texts, for low voice, conceived for and dedicated to Mack Harrell. The cycle spans a tonal world of D Minor/D Major, with a carefully constructed emotional arc.
The first two songs suggest a grouping of '“sin and expiation,” the third balances the cycle, as the singer makes peace with himself before God. The writing is syllabic, but lyrical, a return to Susannah’s tonal world. Songs four and five embrace acceptance and repose. The cycle concludes with words from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans as the music drifts back into an idyllic Susannah mood, all torment and searching daring away; anything, in fact, as the text affirms, that might “separate me from the love of God.”

— Thomas Holliday
Taken from Falling Up: the days
and nights of Carlisle Floyd