We live in a complex world.
Two choral works that the St. Peter's Choir have sung in recent months offer a kind of musical, choral complexity that invite further reflection.
This unexpected nexus of traditionally separate materials is fertile creative ground for Ives. At the symphonic level, it becomes Mahlerian with the addition of jocular American hymnodic snippets ricocheting through the orchestra. But in Ives's The Sixty-Seventh Psalm, the coalescence of disparate key areas create a new harmonic gravity, one hitherto unexplored.
In this eight-part choral work composed around the turn of the century, Ives sets up the men in one key and the women in another. Even within these confines, Ives does not shy away from angular chromaticisms.
The resulting interplay between the music in these two keys is thick, dense, rich. It is surprisingly luminous, weightless.
Timeless. Eternal.
Composed less than four decades later, Olivier Messiaen's O sacrum convivium offers a different kind of harmonic complexity. Here the resulting sound is not from a deliberate mishmash of two conventional keys, but from Messiaen deliberately crafting the music in his own idiosyncratic tonal language.
Messiaen had synesthesia, a neurological condition which allowed him to "see" sound – to perceive sound as color. The resulting music of O sacrum convivium, if we may read into this unique element of Messiaen's biography, is one of shifting color.
In fact – and I hope that a close analysis of the harmonic sequence might bear this out – I wonder if it's not meant to be a rainbow, the symbol of the covenant in the Hebrew Bible? After all, the words that Messiaen chose for his single liturgical motet are also about covenant, the "New Covenant", et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur (a "pledge of future glory"). For someone who saw sound as color, wouldn't the ability to forge this connection in music hold particular appeal?
Both Ives and Messiaen create new harmonic territory, and in the particular alchemy which is choral singing, a good deal of rehearsal must be given over to learn how to dwell in these musical spaces. In our recent experiences with these pieces, this is not an unpleasant enterprise. It is the familiar sensation of choral singing, contributing an essential part to an integral whole, but taken further.
There is something "static" about both works. Both are generally slow moving, though there is a quicker central section in the Ives. In the case of Ives, the work returns to the exact same chord with which it began. In the case of the Messiaen, the final chord is different in that the final soprano note is lowered. In fact, it would be possible – in a Shenkerian vein, I suppose – to see the various harmonic meanderings of O sacrum convivium as a "resolution" of the first chord. The logic of the Ives is self-contained by its own devices, but the logic of the Messiaen is contained by his particular harmonic language. The "resolved" Messiaen chord is still a dissonant one in a "common practice" sense.
There is something captivating about both of these pieces. Messiaen, the mystic, shrouds the sacrament of Holy Communion in its attendant mystery and ecstasy. Ives, the maverick, bends the rules of music to craft a hymn of praise like nothing that had been heard before.
But maybe it's not enough to stop with an appreciation (whatever that means) or analysis of these two pieces. Maybe we also need to examine the unrelenting human impulse for increasing complexity in music as well as in our day to day lives.
O sacrum convivium stands alone as Messiaen's only liturgical motet. I imagine he wrote it because he had something very meaningful to say. It's completely understandable that he did not write another given that he believed plainsong to be the true (and simple) choral music of the Church. And yet, Messiaen would compose some of the most complex music of the twentieth century, harmonically and otherwise. In fact, his O sacrum convivium is rather tame by comparison.
Where does the increasing drive toward complexity end? We see in "minimalism" the movement toward un-complexity: a rejection of the academy's elevation of hyper-complexity (as beautiful as it may be; listen to "New Music Fight Club" from Meet the Composer for a deep dive on this).
I wonder if in the Church "praise music" could be a stand-in for "minimalism", the latest in the series of rejections of perceived hyper-complexity in the history of church music (think Palestrina and the legend behind his saving polyphony).
Within the Hymnal 1982 the service music of Richard Felciano and the William Albright hymn tune PETRUS show that we are still highly susceptible to the tendency toward maximal complexity. And I know that both Ives and Messiaen have also been accused of going too far.
In the case of the two pieces under discussion, however, I think the resulting complexity is just right. We're talking about music for a choir, mind you, not a congregation.
And its music that has something to say about our relationship with the divine.
There is a complexity to it.
"O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,"
"Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee."
"the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,"
"Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us."
Alleluia (a complex one, of the Messiaen variety).
Labels: Charles Ives, Messiaen
A colleague recently inquired about the Duruflé Toccata at the end of the the Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols from King's College, Cambridge. I have to admit that while I had some considerable familiarity with the voluntaries at the service, I had not added them to the spreadsheet.
That omission has been corrected.
The first voluntary is always the chorale "In dulci jubilo," BWV 729 by J. S. Bach. It was played rather more imaginatively this year (by Organ Scholar Parker Ramsey) than it has been in the past.
I must, of course, note here that the value in gaining access to previous service booklets would reveal at what point this first voluntary became part of the "ordinary" of the service, or if it has literally always been this way.
The second (and third!) voluntaries are more variable, but reveal that there is some repetition. French (Belgian!) toccatas are very popular.
Pieces that have been repeated over the years include
- Toccata - Duruflé
- Toccata - Jongen
- Dieu parmi nous - Messiaen
If I had to put money on it I would say that "Carillon de Westminster" is also in this group, though it has only appeared once since 1997.
So even if it's not "Christmassy" per se, the Duruflé fits right in with the repeated toccatas, and other big French pieces played after the service:
- Dupré Prelude and Fugue in B
- Langlais Fête
- Mulet Carillon-Sortie
- Vierne Final from Symphony VI
It even fits the mold (mould?) of Francophile toccatas by Anglos: Baker & Briggs.
There are also some real oddball pieces like "Recessional on 'In the bleak midwinter'" by Lionel Steuart Fothringham.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and guess that he's an English composer.
Actually, given the list we've examined the real outlier is the Bach Sinfonia from Cantata 29.
But Bach is always welcome at the party.
Labels: Duruflé, Jongen, King's College (Cambridge), Messiaen, organ music, Vierne
An Olivier Messiaen convergence occurred in New York this past week.
Last Friday, Olivier Latry performed an all-Messiaen recital at Alice Tully Hall.
On Tuesday Jon Gillock performed Méditations sur la Mystère de la Sainte Trinité on the new organ at Church of the Ascension
Both performances were reviewed in the New York Times
- Latry: Smith, Steve. "Messiaen Moments, in Swells and Fanfares"
- Gillock: Tommasini, Anthony. A French Instrument for a Piece From Paris
Labels: Alice Tully Hall, Church of the Ascension (New York), Gillock, Latry, Messiaen
Spend some time with the French master today:
I, for one, will be observing not just a day, but a year of Messiaen (mostly because I haven't learned enough yet).
Labels: improvisation, Messiaen
I was listening to the beginning of NPR's recording of Björk in concert at United Palace in New York city, when I was surprised by something that sounded an awful lot like organ music by Olivier Messiaen.
It is Messiaen.
Björk's song "Cover Me" quotes "Les Bergers" from La Nativité du Seigneur.
Of course, it's played on a silly synthesized generic 8' 4' 2' organ sound.
If you have the NPR audio file, try listening about 2:38 in to the track.
Organist Paul Jacobs is giving some recitals in Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports.
"One of the great joys of being an organist is that we [sic] actively perform five centuries of music," Jacobs said. "Even music that predates Bach, all the way through contemporary times, like the music of Olivier Messiaen as well as Samuel Adler, and there are new composers writing for the organ all the time.""Pulling out all the stops." Honolulu Star-Bulletin 9 June 2006
emphasis added
I thought it was great to see Samuel Adler listed among Bach and Messiaen. He's a great composer, after all. But I still wonder about it. What's Paul Jacobs playing by Sam Adler these days?
Labels: Messiaen
Last year I started thinking about the Trinity as a dance, and that's a nice, 1960s sort of image. One can imagine God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in white linen robes, adorned with garlands, dancing on a hill somewhere.
"Hey guys," says Jesus, "let's go over here!"
"Oh Jesus," says God, "you always want to dance on the water."
But I digress.
This year, thanks to an excellent sermon I heard and the "born from above" comment in John, I've started thinking about the Trinity as an entity that is "dancing" by perpetually giving birth to itself.
Giving birth to itself. It's weird, I know. But it's seems to me that if one of the key attributes of God is his ability to create, could not one conceive of God as a force always engaged in creation? as the act of creation itself?
The idea of three-in-one is a bit much. Heck, the idea of two-in-one is a bit much, as Mitch Hedberg would remind us at this point.
It was a two-in-one shampoo and two-in-one is a bullsh*t term because one isn't big enough to hold two. That's why two was created. If it was two-in-one, it would be overflowing. The bottle would be all sticky and sh*t . . .
They say that Jesus was fully God and fully man. Expressed numerically he was 100% God and 100% man. So that means he was 200%, um, what, exactly?
So if it's difficult to conceive of a shampoo/conditioner, or a fully-God, fully-human Jesus, how much more difficult is it to conceive of a God/Jesus/Holy Spirit?
Something has to give, or the "bottle" will explode. That's why I think I like this imagery of constant motion (dance) or creation (birth): it helps me wrap my mind around the Trinity.
A similar image to this perpetual birthing idea might be God making himself present in the burning bush. The bush is on fire (with God's holiness), and yet doesn't burn up (protected by God's quintessential creativity).
Looking a little more closely at Exodus 3 (the King James version, because I'm feeling snarky), we see God announcing his holiness/creativity:
And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.Exodus 3:5-6
God relates a genealogy beginning with Moses's father, but then leaps backward to narrate the creative force with which God has guided his people: Abraham (God makes Sarah laugh with a child in her old age), Isaac (God spares Isaac with a ram caught in a bush--though this one is not on fire; Rebekah is barren but gives birth to twins), Jacob (the father of Israel). God is essentially explaining why it is that the Bush isn't burning up: it's because he's cool creative.
The generative perpetual-birth image is the polar opposite of the consuming Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail (perpetual-survival bordering on perpetual-death hinting at perpetual-motion).
And while the concept Ouroboros doesn't really make sense, it is something that can be represented graphically. Perpetual birthing, however, takes a little more imagination, and a lot more graphic skill (perhaps Mr. Escher would like to give this a try?).
We at Sinden.org, however, do not preach in the art library, we preach from the organ bench, so we need not graphic skill, but musical references.
The final movement of Olivier Messiaen's Les Corps Glorieux (1939) is about the Trinity (full disclosure: Messiaen was the organist at La Trinité in Paris for over 60 years). In my initial encounter with it, I was amazed how Messiaen was able to create an effect reminiscent of descending Shepard tones. In the descending Shepard scale, as in Messiaen's composition, by low octaves that fade away and quietly give birth to higher pitches which are descending. The trick of the illusion is to have their introduction be so subtle, and so much a part of the texture, that the listener assumes that they were always there and have been descending for some time.
It's interesting that Messiaen chooses this rhetorical device of catabasis, one with which Bach was also acquainted. In Bach's usage, descending devices had to do particularly with Jesus and his descent/birth.
The "St. Anne" Fugue in E-Flat Major, BWV 552b from the Third Part of the Clavierübung is often regarded as Bach's Trinitarian composition par excellence. With a key signature of three flats, the "St. Anne" is a triple fugue consisting of three large sections (Father, Son, and do I really need to tell you?).
The first section is large creative gesture, like the exposition of any fugue. Starting from a single line, the slow moving fugue subject gradually expands to two, then three, four, and ultimately five voices (no Trinitarian symbolism here, just some "compositional chest thumping"). The second theme moves much more quickly. This section is customarily performed on another manual with a slightly smaller sound. Usually this is the Rückpositiv, the part of the organ closest to the congregation, thereby symbolizing Jesus' descent. This is a kind of surround-sound catabasis, if you will. The final theme is a spirited dance that sweeps up the other two themes, usually played on the original manual with the second one coupled (combined) into it. This final section, when played by a theologically inclined organist, will combine all the themes and the two sound schemes used in the previous two sections.
All this talk of birth seems to place emphasis on the second figure of the Trinity. Even Messiaen's scoring of the last movement of Les Corps Glorieux seems to place a lot of emphasis on Jesus, the middle voice. Jesus was actually born on earth and he is the one who speaks of being "born from above" in today's gospel. And so, we see that this creative self-birthing Trinity wants to include us in the dance; the Trinitarian God wants to give birth to us. We are invited into the dance through the Rückpositiv and then swept up into the Hauptwerk.
Birth is messy, sort of like the overflowing 2-in-1 shampoo bottle. In an episode of the Gilmore Girls--you know you watch it too--Lorelai Gilmore is describing the miracle of birth to a soon-to-be mother. Lorelai cautions her not to look at the baby until they clean it off a little or she'll think she's "given birth to phlegm".
Births are also miraculous, and it's no wonder that we experience a sense of the divine when we encounter God's creative, life-giving nature this way.
We also encounter God in the holy burning bush. We don't understand it, but we are strangely compelled to turn aside.
And so, the Trinity is not just a mystery, it's a messy miracle which, like the bush, invites us to take off our shoes and join the dance.
Trinitarian death tangent: They say that deaths often come in threes. Did you know that the three deaths on November 22, 1963 led to a novel?
Labels: Messiaen
Now I've done it. I've gone and read the most inappropriate review of Messiaen ever. It's from Amazon's page for Hans-Ola Ericsson's Volume 6:
He builds the anticipation to such a high degree that by the end of this movement you will be dizzy and salivating, begging him to release you... and he wont [sic]... until... the very end. The end is so magnificent, almost orgasmic. I have personally passed out after listening to this piece due to hyperventillation [sic]! It is the most beautiful thing Ive [sic] ever heard since Barber's Requiem [sic].This is not for the uninitiated. Do not play it for your girlfriend, that is unless she likes dense and intense music. In which case watch out cause I may steal her from you. If you are a girl... how YOU doin'? (wink wink :)
Howells maybe, but not Messiaen.
Incidentally, why is this particular CD so expensive? $41.98?! The other CD's in this set are around $20 on Amazon. Yes, it's a two CD set, but come on. Suddenly Olivier Latry's complete Messiaen seems like a bargain.
Do crows have ears? I'm sure they do, but would the Pope carry one?
Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow's ear, that he had carried in public.Fisher, Ian. "A public end for an extraordinary papacy." International Herald Tribune 4 April 2005.
I think Ian meant crosier.
Crow's Ear organist tangent: This reminds me of one of my favorite organists: Catherine Crow's Ear?
Bird-organists tangent: Frederick Swan? Gordon Turkey? Stefan Eagles?
bona fide bird organist: Olivier Messiaen
Labels: Messiaen
I found special meaning for Good Friday in an unlikely place this year: the Nativity:
Olivier Messiaen: "Jésus accepte la souffrance" from La Nativité du Seigneur
The scripture at the head of the score is one of the assigned lessons for Good Friday:
Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,
"Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body you have prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.Then I said, 'See, God, I have come to do your will, O God'
(in the scroll of the book it is written of me)."Hebrews 10:5-7
This piece is quickly becoming my favorite by Messiaen.
Labels: Messiaen
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