Rejoicing Resounding

Published December 16, 2012 Uncategorized 4 Comments
Tags: Emmanuel Church, Emmanuel Music, Pat Krol, Ryan Turner

I’m on the Acela after a fine brunch with Emmanuel Church friends Ryan Turner and Pat Krol – this after the service at which my Gaudete in Domino was premiered. As I expected, the choir did a great job. By calling for a slightly earlier rehearsal time before the service than usual, Ryan (the group’s conductor) got the ensemble some extra time to touch on various details of my piece. Ryan knows what he wants – a slightly different emphasis in the text, a warmer sound here, a lighter sound there – and knows how to ask for it; the choir, in turn, knows how to respond to his requests, and does so with skill and with abundant good will. The congregation at Emmanuel is uniquely trained to listen intently, having listened to weekly Bach cantatas and other great stuff for years. So they are uncommonly receptive to my music, often responding with unusually insightful comments. One gentleman this morning remarked on my setting of the words “Dominus prope est” - the Lord is at hand. He noted that the customary reading of this line associates it with the imminent arrival of the Lord at the end of time (the scripture texts for Advent have an apocalyptic side). My setting – pianissimo, warmly harmonized, low in register – represented another reading: a sense of calm assurance about the Lord’s presence here and now.

Emmanuel Church is indeed a place where the Lord’s presence can be felt – a place where the hidden wholeness of which Thomas Merton wrote breaks into our lives. I’ll say it again: for this I am deeply grateful.

Emmanuel Music’s website here, Facebook page here.

update: My shots from Sunday’s rehearsal mostly didn’t come out well – just this one seems worth sharing:

update #2: Emmanuel parishioner Elizabeth Richardson was kind enough to pass along a picture taken at the post-Eucharist gathering for hospitality. Here I am (on the left) with parishioner Michael Scanlon (I dig the bowtie, Michael. There were some nice ones among the choir members as well.)

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4 Responses to “Rejoicing Resounding”

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1 Hayes Biggs December 16, 2012 at 4:13 pm

Congratulations! I’ll look forward to hearing it.

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2 Joybells December 16, 2012 at 6:44 pm

It was sublime: at various points arresting, tender, heartbreaking. Thank you.

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- 3 jamesprimosch December 16, 2012 at 10:48 pm
  
  Thank you so much, Joy. It gives me such pleasure to share my music with such an appreciative community.
  
  Reply

1 The Crossing and “Much Magic” « Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog Trackback on December 24, 2012 at 1:42 pm

James Primosch, composer

When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".

Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Lydian, Cavani, Cassatt, Ying, and Miami string quartets, the 21st Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, Dawn Upshaw, Lisa Saffer, Janice Felty, and Lambert Orkis. Twelve of his compositions have been recorded for Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

Current Projects:

Working with audio wizard George Blood on editing recordings of "Holy the Firm", "From a Book of Hours", "Four Sacred Songs", and "Dark the Star" for eventual CD release. The performers are Susan Narucki, William Sharp, and the 21st Century Consort, directed by Christopher Kendall.

Two composition projects:
- a cycle of songs for soprano and orchestra. Susan Stewart, whose poetry I have set in three previous pieces, has written new poems specifically for this project, to be called "A Sibyl".
- an oboe quartet for Peggy Pearson, commissioned by Winsor Music.

David Patrick Stearns on “Songs for Adam”

If there's anything out there like Primosch's Songs of Adam, I haven't heard it - though the music wears its singularity lightly, with no need to express itself radically. It has a confidence of expression that comes of Primosch's having written a steady stream of song cycles since the late 1990s. Composers are still drawing legitimate inspiration from poets of the increasingly distant past, such as Walt Whitman, but Primosch pushes both himself and thus his listeners onto new ground with Susan Stewart's verse, which are called songs in their printed version because they suggest music, especially in the first poem, in which Adam is stuttering his way into existence.

Both poet and composer share an ability to contemplate how basic elements of existence might feel for the first time, and the duo know how to capture that in their respectively cultivated vocabularies, with an emotional rightness that never becomes too analytical.

In fact, Primosch enters the Korngold zone when describing Adam's intoxication with the word. Though words are set dramatically and in ways that are well written for the voice, the best moments are in the masterly orchestration, which gives an extra percussive spark to moments of discovery and unflinchingly confronts the agony of Adam's expulsion from Eden.

The pale strings capture his disappointment in the real world in an overall dramatic arc that's almost epic, going from the unimaginable (the beauty of Eden) to the unthinkable (the world's first children, Abel and Cain, and the world's first fratricide).
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010

Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog