Music that changes the world – one catacomb at a time

Music – it is often said – is about one thing: Music. It only conveys itself. But it has magical adhesive qualities when in the company of words, ideas, subtexts, which is why the classical world has evolved into a medium for social justice. If the Supreme Court won’t stand up for saving the planet, the composers will – but with an abstraction that, in its best instances, hits the gut rather than the brain.

The most surprising development, for me, is how the text of the Roman Catholic Mass figures into this. The Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei are timeless and open ended, no matter what the current politics may be within the churches themselves. They constitute a floor plan for current composers of all stripe, often taking a cue from Britten’s War Requiem that melded traditional texts with more modern ones in the interest of confronting our times more directly.

Three new instances, here:

For Tawnie Olson (b. f974), the Catholic Mass was, by her own account, almost an unconscious point of reference for the five movements of Beloved of the Sky, a piece premiered on Friday July 8 by The Crossing choir in Philadelphia with texts taken from the diaries of Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945). For David Shapiro (b. 1969), the Mass suggested a design and philosophy behind Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass, also premiered by The Crossing on July 8. Additional words were by Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), the biologist and author who also happens to be a confirmed (though not shrill) atheist. In her Mass for the Endangered, Sarah Kirkland Snider (b. 1973) employed the Latin text augmented by poet Nathaniel Bellows (b. 1972), almost like a garden in which many unprecedented things can grow. The piece has been around for a few years, is recorded on the Nonesuch label and has lately enjoyed high-profile performances in Chicago and at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Catacombs.

The actual words of Olson’s Beloved of the Sky are religious only in the sense that painter Carr, who is among Canada’s most important painters but only began to be recognized in her late 50s, is often pleading with higher forces – frantically – to get what is inside her soul onto a canvass that she is painting. Carr’s candid diary quotes also cover the painter’s considerations of form, color and content. The music is elegant, contained, relatively circumscribed harmonically, as if to convey the contained world of the painter, who seems to have had only enough recognition to continue with her work. But within that containment, Olsen’s harmonies are often breathtaking.

Word settings are mostly syllabic. The first movement “I went down deep” unfolds like a wedge, starting small but with a determined linear progression, prying open a niche in the larger world. The third movement, “Oh, that lazy, stodgy, lumpy feeling” is halting, unfolding in appropriate fits and starts. The fourth movement, “The subject means little,” has a fascinating emotional progression from struggling with the value of her work to an almost mystical realization of the oneness of world. The concluding “I made a small sketch” suggests a small, isolated voice being heard somehow through the world – and through the ages.

Shapiro’s Sumptuous Planet has some explicit references to the Catholic Mass but, through its 15 movements, is all over the musical map, with references to Renaissance-era vocal harmonies as well as the crowded rhythms associated with David Lang plus a references to Debussy’s “Fetes” from Trois Nocturnes. One particularly fascinating effect was splitting the choir in two parts, one shadowing the other, quietly and never exactly. The texts are all over the philosophical map with titles such as “Mercy,” “Glory,” “Adoration,” “Spirit – Mystic Jelly” and “Take Away the Sins of the World – Sin” – sometimes at the expense of cohesiveness with each movement being a world unto itself.

But who cares about cohesion when the music is this great? Yes, great. Well, maybe not all of it, but the movement “Death, the Lucky Ones” should be the composer’s ticket to immortality. It began with a straightforward musical setting of the words “We are going to die.” No sentimentality. No fear. Just a statement of fact. The Dawkins text goes on to say “how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” I disagree with his belief that there is no afterlife, having been haunted by numerous deceased loved ones. But I suspect I’ll always be wonderstruck by Shapiro’s harmonic construction that, however complicated, felt incredibly cleansing.

The innate tension between the prose element of Dawkins’ words and the fundamental lyricism of Shapiro’s vocal writing often increased my attention to the inner workings of the music. The one time that effect failed, to my ears, was in the seventh movement – the “sin” movement – which did something no message-oriented piece should do: It lectured, and did so about teaching acts of generosity, which, hopefully, is something that audiences at The Crossing do as a matter of course. At the end of the piece, the near-capacity audience at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill gave the piece a loud, whooping hero’s reception. It’s one thing for a piece like this to hit a nerve, another to send the listeners jumping to their feet.

Snider’s Mass for the Endangered warrants all of the success that it has had, though it points to the strengths and the pitfalls of social justice in music. The sound palette is airy with highly transparent choral textures and spare accompaniments (often piano and/or harp) playing an eloquent, easily-grasped motif that often stops in mid-gesture, as if to ask a question that has yet to be answered.

It’s frankly beautiful. Snider consistently delivers music you want to hear. Though grand in conception, the scale is modest, even portable, and in June had a performance at Green-Wood Cemetery Catacombs, presented by the enterprising organization, Death of Classical. As heard on the Nonesuch-label recording by Gallicantus, the music has a keen sense of collage – with thoughtfully chosen musical objects co-existing in the same sound canvass. The Kyrie begins with a consonant chord containing a single dissonant note, tipping off the listener that love for the planet will be mixed with sorrow and anger over its current state of degradation. Particularly magical and virtuosic is the convergence of disparate elements in the Agnus Dei, whose music is powerful enough that I stopped asking myself what the composer’s purpose was in so frequently repeating the words “Agnus Dei.” Sometimes, as with the great baroque composers, text is repeated to help bring the musical idea to its full conclusion.

My main reservation is the Bellows text. It has to be credited as an inspirational factor in Snider’s music, and its thoughts are the nerve center of the piece. But the actual words are better read than sung. Sample line: “Enslaved by sordid time—the inward-turning eye, in scarcity, with basest acts—Lamb of God—no punishment no cruel attack.” This isn’t spoken English but written English, and it needs to be contemplated over several readings. Sung text, however, needs to illicit a gut reaction if it’s to have true synergy with the music. Music exists in the moment – and Snider’s transcends words that do not exist in the moment.

It’s a lesson to us all. And why, perhaps, do the words of the Latin mass still work in a musical setting? Anyone brought up in the most vaguely Christian community has heard them over a lifetime, for better or for worse, often with a personal subtext that gives the music a starting point for either debunking or augmenting your preconceived notions towards them.

When getting out a message is the basic impetus of the piece, does the music come first? Or the message? Should we be attracted by the music first and secondarily get the idea? Or apprehend the idea first, be reminded of the issues, and then being made to care by the music? Some such works – such as Gabriela Lena Frank’s confrontational “Pachamama Meets an Ode,” which is having much mileage thanks to the Philadelphia Orchestra, has program notes that need as much time and concentration as the piece itself. Other times – with Steven Stucky’s raging Silent Spring, which is a companion piece with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in a just-released recording by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on the Reference label, the message is so obvious in the music that, once you get it, you’re less inclined to make a return visit.

My personal hope is that composers stand back from what they’re trying to say, remember that the more viable their music, the more legs that it will have – and the more people will hear its message.