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FOREWORDColloquium: Music, Worship, ArtsPassion and pathos are aspects of the human psyche that exist in all cultures, times, and places. Artists and musicians do not have a monopoly on the passions and pathos of life, but they may be better at articulating them than others, and those two themes weave their way throughout the articles that comprise this edition of Colloquium. As a collection of works that the Institute of Sacred Music’s students and faculty have heard and responded to, Colloquium journal serves as a resource for us as well as for a larger community interested in the intersection of academics, praxis, belief, worship, music, visual arts, and literature. It effectively says that these are among the most worthwhile and enduring endeavors of the human soul. Those of us who work in the creation, performance, or study of artistic passion are indebted to the contributors to this volume. Destination: Mexico records the ISM study tour to our neighbor to the south, the first excursion of the Institute into Latin America with its colorful history, art, and music. With nineteen million people, Mexico City is the second largest metropolis in the world and one where cathedrals, pipe organs, choirs, and motets have flourished since 1523. In this volume, Father Ricardo Valenzuela offers the reader some data about the liturgical life of those nineteen million souls, and about his job as the director of worship for the largest diocese in the world. With a glint of humor he asks: what would you do in my shoes? That diocese includes the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a religious icon that is also Mexico’s national emblem. Professor Clara Bargellini tells the complicated story of the image and its importance in the social and economic context of the times. Guadalupe, of course, fostered an immense amount of passionate devotion and choral music in the Baroque styles of the time, as well as pieces for organ. Edward Pepe has researched the history of that musical instrument in Mexico. Contrary to popular belief, it was the organ and the harp, and not the guitar, that were the “national instruments” in colonial times, and every church musician had to be competent on both. They also had to lead the boys’ and mens’ choirs that flourished in the viceregal era; some continue today. This rich heritage is the message of Craig Russell’s study of cathedral Matins, which was as much a grand public entertainment and “opera” for its day as one of the liturgical hours. We get an insight into Baroque culture and the way in which the church provided high culture to a metopolitan and cosmospolitan society. Prof. Lorenzo Candelaria takes us on a sleuthing expedition from the archives of the Beinecke Library at Yale to the Cathedral of Toledo in Spain by focusing on the largest choir manual that Yale owns, a truly monumental book. The musical selections also show the sophistication of the culture that traveled across the Atlantic and met a new and appreciative audience in New Spain (Mexico). Sacred Space was the title of the international conference presented by the Institute in conjunction with the Yale School of Architecture’s symposium Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture (whose papers will be published separately). As with any conference on church design, there were strong opinions and flaring passions. Here, Richard Vosko, a liturgical designer, asks the theological question: What is the relationship between a religious community’s ecclesiology (its sense of being church) and the shape of the building in which it worships? That is a very different starting point for church architecture from an aesthetic or merely utilitarian approach. Prof. Louis Nelson looked at the question of space and denominational identity in the United States of the mid-twentieth century; he showed us where we have come from as a preface to where we are going. Then Jesuit Father Friedhelm Mennekes threw a monkey wrench into the works by challenging the audience to think of spatial emptiness as the most authentic visual paradigm for twenty-first century worship. Liturgy and Theology takes us to a recurring theme at the Institute: both are always manifest in the hymns we sing, and the music and art that we create. That, of course, includes the literary arts as well, and Prof. Éamonn Ó Carragáin bridges both art forms in dealing with the early medieval “high crosses” of the British Isles. By comparing the Middle English Dream of the Rood with liturgical texts and the iconography on the stone crosses, he shows a level of theological sophistication that few thought to have existed in the so-called Dark Ages. Like the intricacies of Celtic interlacing, Prof. Janet Walton weaves something similar in her impassioned call for worship that reflects the contemporary social issues of our times, a “liturgy that does justice” on the altar of the world and in the face of the pathos of humankind. In Mexico, Institute students and faculty saw that music and color are, so to speak, in the blood. Indeed, passion and pathos are always expressed somehow in that vital human fluid, be it literal or figurative, as here recorded in Bach in the Blood. Johann Sebastian Bach understood this and wrote his passions for a liturgical context, as Prof. Markus Rathey tells us. Rather than being concert works, their original context can only be understood together with the sermons, hymns, and order of service of the Lutheran congregations during Holy Week. But they are not without their difficulties, and Prof. Michael Marissen takes us through a minefield by showing how text and music suggest something very different from the usual charge of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism in the St. John Passion. This is new material and will certainly be helpful for the church or concert performer, as will be Prof. Daniel Melamed’s insights as to how the passions were actually performed, and who sang what—it is not what we usually think, and that’s precisely why it, like the other topics, belongs in an ISM colloquium. Ours is the ideal forum where students, faculty, and interested friends can confront the varied subjects and ways in which pathos and passion grip our souls. Jaime Lara |
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