by Bill Scanlan Murphy
N. CAMERON BRITT (born 1974)
INLEDNING
Composed: 2004
Premiered: Baltimore, 2004
Currently a Fulbright Scholar in composition and percussion in Sweden, N. Cameron Britt composed Inledning (Swedish for "Introduction") as his bid for the ultimate in musical compression. Form enthusiasts (they do exist!) will want to know that this piece is in a clearly-defined tertiary (A-B-A) form; the more discerning will discover that each individual sub-section is itself in A-B-A form, giving us an impressive formula of ABACDCABA for the overall structure of the work. Race fans, however, will be more impressed by the fact that this complex edifice is crammed into one minute of music. Listen fast!
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
AVE VERUM CORPUS
Composed: 1791
Premiered: Baden, Germany, 1791
Never a particularly religious man in the formal sense, tending more to the universal abstractions of Freemasonry, Mozart turned out a succession of religious works beginning in the spring of 1791 when he heard that Leopold Hofmann, the head of music at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, was seriously ill and likely to die at any time. Spotting a potential career move (the St. Stephen's job was one of the best musical positions in the country), Mozart set about proving himself the best religious composer in town; his very last work, the Requiem, would be part of this self-reinvention. Ironically, the musician who led the first memorial service for Mozart would be none other than Leopold Hofmann.
The text of Ave Verum Corpus (Hail, true body) is a fourteenth-century Eucharistic hymn, usually sung during the Consecration of the Mass. For all its undeniable beauty, there are signs that Mozart's wonderful setting was written in a hurry (Mozart was, after all, scribbling out the full score of The Magic Flute at the time); there are no tempo or dynamic markings on the manuscript, and some of the string parts are in another hand than Mozart's (possibly that of his student Sussmayr, who completed the Requiem after Mozart's death). Mozart completely omits the last two lines of the original Latin text; these were probably intoned by the priest in Gregorian Chant at the first performance, which was during a Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi.
Ave Verum Corpus is all of 46 measures long. Emperor Franz Joseph II had issued an edict that all religious music must be as simple as possible, and not in the"concerted" style familiar from the time of Bach. Mozart obeys his sovereign's command, but raises mandatory simplicity to the realms of the sublime.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
MASS IN C MAJOR, K. 317 ("Coronation")
Composed: 1779
Premiered: Salzburg, Austria, 1779
1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Benedictus
6. Agnus Dei
In 1778, Mozart, still only 23, went to Paris with his parents in search of a job commensurate with his talents, and was soon rewarded with the offer of the position of Court Organist at the Palace of Versailles. Amazingly, he turned this down as beneath his musical dignity. On the one hand, he did himself an unwitting favor; the organist who took the job was guillotined on the same day as the King in 1793. On the other, he quite literally broke his mother's heart: Maria Mozart dropped dead when she heard the news. Leopold Mozart always blamed his son for his wife's death; there is a case to be made for saying that the long slide to Wolfgang's own early death began here.
On returning, miserable, to Salzburg, Mozart became court organist to Prince-Archbishop Heironymus Colloredo; precisely how he thought this was a better job than doing the same for Louis XVI is a mystery. Part of the job was writing sacred music for the cathedral – effectively the Prince-Archbishop's other palace. The"Coronation" Mass was written for Easter Sunday, 1779; it would only acquire its nickname when it was performed at the coronation of Leopold II in Prague in 1791.
Archbishop Colloredo subscribed fully to Franz Joseph's no-frills musical rules in church, but still expected music that would emphasize his own sub-Imperial majesty. This made life not a little difficult for the composer. Mozart sums up the problem himself:
"Our church music is very different to that of Italy, all the more so since a mass with all its movements, even for the most solemn occasions when the sovereign himself reads the mass, must not last more than three quarters of an hour. One needs a special training for this kind type of composition, and it must also be a mass with all instruments - war trumpets, timpani etc."
In other words, a small Mass with all the trappings of a big one. One of the ways Mozart squares this particular circle is to use the soloists almost as a semi-chorus rather than as operatic-style individuals, though the moments that he breaks this convention are among the work's many highlights. There are moments when he gets a little carried away with the soloists in ways that must have raised ecclesiastical eyebrows: the Benedictus loops weirdly back on itself after the closing Hosanna section has begun, for no better reason than to give the soloists a run at the text. The daunting slab of dogma that is the Credo is treated as (of all things) a rondo. The unmistakably literal"pastoral" setting of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) may well be, for all its loveliness, a deadpan dig at the Prince-Archbishop, whose intellectual fragility was one of the few things that Mozart and his father agreed upon.
Somewhat to Mozart's own surprise, the work became a firm favorite in Salzburg. Its standing with the composer himself can be judged from the fact that he recycled the Agnus Dei as the aria Dove sono in Le Nozze di Figaro. It was, in fact, the popularity of the aria that resulted in the Mass being performed again for Leopold's coronation, and thus earning the work the name it holds to this day.
RANDOL BASS (born 1953)
GLORIA
Composed: 1990
Premiered: New York, 1990
Randol Bass, currently Music Director and Conductor for the Metropolitan Winds of Dallas, Texas, has established himself among the leading figures of contemporary worship music, treading an easy path between semi-popular and more"serious" styles. Gloria is a setting of the Latin text from the Mass – "Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will" – and has become a firm Christmas favorite among all denominations.
JOHN ADAMS (born 1947)
HARMONIELEHRE
I. (untitled)
II. The Amfortas Wound
III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Composed: 1981
Premiered: New York, 1981
John Adams tells us that Harmonielehre was inspired by a dream in which he was traveling across the San Francisco Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker suddenly stand on its end and blast into space like a rocket. However, he has also said that the work has a deep didactic purpose—no less a task than putting the last century of musical history to rights.
Harmonielehre (The Study of Harmony) was the title of Arnold Schoenberg's most important theoretical work — but it contains not a word about his twelve-note system or atonality, the twin bugbears (along with flying tankers) that inspired Adams. Adams' Harmonielehre has been memorably described as his"poison pen letter to Schoenberg", in which he systematically deconstructs Schoenberg's twelve-tone citadel block by block, ironically largely by using late-Romantic gestures that the young Schoenberg would have found entirely familiar. Adams, equally ironically, is certainly driven far out of his own minimalist trench to take on the serialist foe.
Adams is often mentioned in the same minimalist breath as Philip Glass, but his music still contains the ghost of impressionism and even Romanticism; the minimalist processing is present, true, but the dream that emerges from the machinery is a living music, without the angular glass-and-steel cybernetics of Glass. At first glance, the endlessly repeating common chords and arpeggios of orthodox"minimalism" would seem very under-armed opponents for the Schoenbergian juggernaut.
The untitled first movement begins with rapidly-repeating E minor chords that positively scream"minimalism" until the cellos enter with a long, searching melody that would be equally non grata with serialists or minimalists.
The second movement, The Amfortas Wound, takes its title from the story of Parsifal. King Amfortas' wound can never heal until Parsifal, the"pure fool" restores the King with the lance that pierced Christ's side. In the Adams metaphor, the King is music itself, lacerated by the prematurely-announced"death" of tonality; here, we are in a world that resembles very dissonant Sibelius.
The third movement, Meister Eckhardt and Quackie, evokes the bizarre image of the medieval theologian Meister Eckhardt, in Adams' own words,"floating through the firmament with a baby on his shoulders as she whispers the secrets of grace into his ear". The source? Yes, Adams has been dreaming again. The baby in question,"Quackie" is Adams' own youngest daughter, Emily. We are now in a surreal musical dreamworld redolent of the more luscious Debussy – or, ironically, the young Schoenberg. Magritte is picking a fight with Picasso.
The flying oil tanker and the airborne philosopher with onboard baby are images we need to place against Schoenberg's arithmetical, logical world and the century of music to which it gave birth. The music, as its name suggests, is there to teach us, and we should be good students – and listen.
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