All Saint’s Day Miscellany

- Network for New Music’s season opener is this coming Sunday, Nov. 6 at 7:30 pm at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia. Program includes music by Ingrid Arauco, Joseph Hallman, Louis Karchin, Thomas Kraines, Andrew Rudin, Arne Running, and Robert Schultz.

- John Harbison talks about his 2nd Symphony here.

- the Library of Congress lets you see Elliott Carter’s sketches for his Piano Sonata, among other pieces,  here.

- visit The Crooked Line to read how extraordinary a place Boston’s Emmanuel Church is, and why it is not a bad idea to have an artistic director who is also a gifted tenor. I have plans for a new Emmanuel motet, too early to let on about details.

- I have just about finished setting this poem for voice and piano, again, more details later.

Boston Adventure, Concluded

Two Arms of the Harbor, my new motet, was premiered at the 10 am Eucharist of Emmanuel Church, Boston this past Sunday. In the past, Emmanuel has slotted my motets after the opening prayer but before the first reading. This time they did the piece after the first reading, in lieu of a responsorial psalm, I suppose. I am not sure this was the best strategy. The readings were very well done, but I think the music had too much expressive weight to successfully work between them. Music between the readings should not overwhelm the scriptures, which are the primary focus of that part of the service, and my piece is too emotionally hot and packed with incident to not be a little overpowering in that spot. At the time I thought about how I would not want to be doing the second reading right after the motet. The vibe in the room was attentive and I think the piece hit home, partly because of how it felt at the time, partly because of the warm comments after the service. Thank you to whoever removed their vocalizing child from the church while my piece was being done!

I was sorry to not hear the church’s rector, Rev. Pamela Werntz preach, but the visiting homilist, Rt. Rev. J. Clark Grew (a retired bishop, if I understand correctly) did well. And it was a pleasure to celebrate a baptism as well – congratulations to the Miles Family! I thought Sumner Thompson, bass, did a superb job with the cantata after communion, BWV 158. John Harbison has a good note speculating about this somewhat unusual piece. The aria with chorale – layering a florid (flaying a lurid? sorry.) solo singer with an even more florid violin obligato (Heidi Braun-Hill), a walking continuo bass and a chorale tune sung by the women of the chorus – was the quietly spectacular high point. The text of the final chorale, right out of Luther, is almost surrealistic:

Here is the true Easter-lamb,

offered up by God,

which was, high on the cross’ stalk,

roasted in hot love,

the blood marks our door

faith holds it against death,

the strangler can no longer harm us,

Hallelujah!

There was a lovely brunch after the service and coffee hour, glad to have a chance to chat with various Emmanuel friends, including fellow blogger Joy Howard, who is Rev. Pam’s spouse.

Sunday evening I attended a fund raiser for Collage New Music. The event featured some chat between the group’s music director, David Hoose, and guest Augusta Read Thomas with some short pieces of Gusty played in first-rate performances. I’m sorry I didn’t catch the name of the violinist and cellist, but the pianist was the splendid Christopher Oldfather – Chris and I go back some 20 years or more, to the first performance of my Three Sacred Songs with soprano Christine Schadeberg. His performance of excerpts from Gusty’s Tracings was stunning. Here are some pictures from the event, including a shot of Gusty and I with Gunther Schuller:

 

and one with Chris Oldfather:

The coda to the Boston trip was a visit to NYC for the American Music Center annual meeting. The AMC/MTC/ACF merger/re-arrangement was discussed, official decision not yet made until votes are tallied. John Harbison received an award:

Among the friends at the meeting were fellow Columbia alums Eric Chasalow (l.) and Paul Moravec:

Now it’s back to grading papers and chairmanly duties at Penn. But good to see friends, good to hear some music.

New motet premieres at Emmanuel Church

I just got word that Ryan Turner, director of Emmanuel Music, will lead the first performance of my new motet Two Arms of the Harbor as part of the 10 AM Sunday Eucharist at Emmanuel Church, Boston this coming May 1. This is a brief SATB setting of a text by Thomas Merton, a journal entry that describes a dream:

“I dreamt I was lost in a great city and was walking “toward the center” without quite knowing where I was going. Suddenly I came to a dead end, but on a height, looking at a great bay, an arm of the harbor. I saw a whole section of the city spread out before me on hills covered with light snow, and realized that, though I had far to go, I knew where I was: because in this city there are two arms of the harbor and they help you to find your way, as you are always encountering them.”

(Thank you to the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust for permission to set this text.) This comes from the 1966 volume Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, one of a series of books offering selections from the journals that Merton kept during his time as a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. (More recently the journals were issued in a complete version; this text comes from the fourth volume of seven, Dancing in the Water of Life.) I find the text deeply consoling, and I have dedicated the piece to the memory of the late Craig Smith, who founded Emmanuel Music some 40 years ago, leading its performances of the Bach cantata cycle for decades.

Emmanuel Music is an extraordinary group, and in this, the sixth piece I have written for them since 1994, I know they will meet all the challenges I have recklessly set for them, and do so with grace and beauty of sound. I do like hearing my music done at Emmanuel, not just because the choir is superb. It is a place where I can bring all my “concert music” skills to bear, unlike the communities where I have generally worked as a church musician myself, where amateur choirs and an almost exclusive emphasis on congregational singing mean my composing is usually in the quasi-pop idiom that predominates in Catholic church music today. Not only is the choir great at Emmanuel, but the worshipping assembly has “ears to hear” as scripture puts it: trained to listen intently by years of hearing the Bach cantatas and similarly nourishing offerings, I know they will hear my piece with attention and sympathy. There are other nice aspects to church performance – only a few people will know I am even there, at least until the coffee hour afterwards; there is no applause, no awkward bowing, no reviewers. Applause, bows and sometimes even reviews are nice, but it is healthy to forego them once in a while. Read more about Emmanuel here, here, and here. A Merton blog I like here. Photo at left: Thomas Merton.

Thursday night: sublime and ridiculous

Five links – the first two beautiful, the second two amusing:

- Joy Howard at The Crooked Line on a sublime performance of a Schein motet at Emmanuel Church.

- The Dalai Lama on what he learned from Thomas Merton.

- via Arts Journal, Creature Comforts on “what is Art?”

-via a Penn colleague, an inimitable performance by Nicolas Slonimsky

-and the last, both sublime and ridiculous; again, via Arts Journal

Thank you, Emmanuel

I am back from Boston where I attended performances of my Spiraling Ecstatically at Emmanuel Church. I wrote about this in previous posts here and here. For now, I want to thank the superb choir of Emmanuel Music, with its new Music Director, Ryan Turner, who conducted my motet; John Harbison, acting Music Director, and Pat Krol, Executive Director of Emmanuel Music, both of whom made so many things possible; and the community that is Emmanuel Church, for their kind interest in my work. Warm congratulations to Rev. Pamela Werntz, the newly instituted Rector at Emmanuel. She presided and preached at the morning prayer service yesterday,  breaking open the Word in a deeply nourishing way. (Go here and click on sermons to read examples of her work.) Emmanuel is in good hands. I’m grateful for the presence of this community in my life.

Update: Read more about the events of the day in the Boston Musical Intelligencer review. Update #2: Pamela Werntz’s wife Joy blogged about the celebration here.

Emmanuel Church interviews

The Boston Musical Intelligencer has a pair of interviews with John Harbison – in his capacity as acting music director at Emmanuel Church - and the Rev. Pamela Werntz, who is to be installed as the new rector at Emmanuel this Sunday. As I wrote about earlier, my motet Spiraling Ecstatically will be done at both the morning prayer service and the installation service/Eucharist in the afternoon.  Spiraling sets a poem of E. E. Cummings, and is a revision of a piece I wrote for the choir of the Catholic Campus Ministry during my student days in the Columbia University doctoral composition program.

Spiralling

Emmanuel Music will sing my Cummings motet, Spiralling Ecstatically this coming Sunday, March 7. The piece will be heard at a 10:00 Morning Prayer service at Emmanuel Church on Newbury St. in Boston, as well as at the 3:00 installation service  for Emmanuel’s new rector, Rev. Pamela L. Werntz. The afternoon service will include the celebration of the Eucharist. Bach cantata #163, Nur jedem das Seine!, will also be heard at the morning service. If you don’t know about Emmanuel, this is a place where a Bach cantata is heard every week in its proper liturgical context, a practice begun under the leadership of the late conductor Craig Smith that has continued now for decades. (It is Craig who conducts Emmanuel on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s sublime CD of Bach solo cantatas.) Emmanuel is a lively and welcoming worshipping community that has an unusual commitment to the highest musical standards. I am very happy to be, in a small way, a part of that community through the motets I have written for Emmanuel over the years. You can hear one of those motets here (scroll down to “choral”), and see a sample of a score for that piece here. I will be there for both services, and also for the BMOP concert on Saturday night – Ball, Wheeler, Hartke, Babbitt, Olivero, Bartók. (At left: the “Pilgrim’s Progress” window at Emmanuel Church.)