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The Riverside Church in New York gave me the chance to set another poem of Crashaw's in memory of Tony Bufano, a chorister there, for Easter Sunday, 1995. "St Mary Magdalene" is a piece I really loved writing, and have heard only once. It calls for a mezzo-soprano solo, and like many of my anthems has an arrangement for brass quintet. Could a non-Catholic church perform it, calling it "Mary Magdalene" instead of "St Mary Magdalene"? It includes lines like this:
Some years ago, Peter Fyfe, a Nashville church musician, called me out of the blue and asked if I would write a Mag/Nunc (Magnificat plus Nunc dimittis)for him. I had no idea what a Mag/Nunc was, but I said I would be delighted. (I might mention that I'm from a Protestant background; I'm what you might call a lapsed Lutheran.) So I looked up the words of the Mag/Nunc and found them full of spirit, charm, and loveliness. I had never paid much attention to any Magnificat later than Bach's, and didn't know the tradition, so I had to filter the words through my own responses. Fyfe liked the way I took pains to write something substantial for the Doxology—twice in fact, both in the Mag and the Nunc. Fortunately, by the time I wrote this piece I had come to believe in the world of the Spirit, so it felt natural to pay special attention to these words. Spoken, the Doxology is almost a perfunctory mantra, but if you have a wonderful chorus, why not treat it like any other beautiful text? A few years ago I wrote a "Gloria" commissioned by Thomas Gibbs in Birmingham, who recently recorded it beautifully. There's really nothing much to say about a Gloria. It's like the Doxology, very challenging if you hope to write glorious music. Another piece of mine that is arguably liturgical and which I've only heard once is "Dona Nobis Pacem," commissioned by The Colorado Children's Chorus. These three words are sung in twenty-six different languages. I've thought of enlarging it to full chorus. I have also enjoyed setting spiritual texts by un-churchly poets for church chorus. We have organized religion to thank for so much of our choral repertory, yet it's a pity that texts appropriate for church services are so limited by the rules of the liturgy. I am continually trying to foist non-liturgical texts on churches that come to me for commissions; quite often I get away with it. I'll mention a few: for instance, my Shelley setting, "On the Mountain"—although maybe there's some problem about Shelley's being an atheist. Then I have very simple settings of two poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence, "The Lamb" and "The Shepherd." These two also exist as songs for solo voice. Another unchurchly poet I've foisted on the laity is Walt Whitman, whose poems comprise my gradually accruing choral magnum opus, "A Whitman Service." One section was written on a church commission, a setting of passages from a magnificent Whitman poem called "The Sleepers." This anthem I call "Measureless Love." I might mention just for fun that there was a bit of an incident. "Measureless Love" was to be performed by one of New York's most distinguished churches, St. Thomas's, for the two hundredth anniversary of the American Guild of Organists, which was having its convention in New York City a few years ago. However a non-musical church authority rejected it because of this line in the text: "The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover." Fortunately it found itself another slot in the festivities. |
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