Today is Saint Cecilia’s Feast Day on the Roman Catholic calendar. The third century martyr is venerated as the patron of music and musicians. According to legend, despite taking a vow of celibacy, she was forced by her parents to marry a pagan nobleman. She “sang in her heart to the Lord” on her wedding day, illustrating the divine, meditative, and transcendent power of music. Fortuitously, the English composer, Benjamin Britten, was …
Roxanna Panufnik (b. 1968) is one of Britain’s most prominent composers. The daughter of the Polish composer and conductor, Andrzej Panufnik, she has written numerous choral works, including Westminster Mass, premiered by London’s Westminster Cathedral Choir; the oratorio, Faithful Journey – a Mass for Poland; and Across the Line of Dreams, a work for two conductors, two choirs, and orchestra, which was premiered by Marin Alsop, Valentina Peleggi, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. …
The music of the Icelandic composer, Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977), seems to rise out of remote, rugged landscapes bathed in pale Nordic sunlight. Thorvaldsdottir’s Heyr þú oss himnum á (“Hear us in heaven”), written in 2005 for the Skálholt Summer Concert Series, is a setting of four verses from an ancient Icelandic psalm by Olafur á Söndum (1560–1627). Scored for mixed choir, it is a meditative prayer filled with primal open intervals and …
Among the twentieth century’s boldest and most innovate musical mavericks was the American composer, Henry Cowell (1897-1965). Cowell’s occasionally riot-inducing experiments included tone clusters (approaching the piano keyboard with arms and fists), graphic notation, polytonality, non-Western modes, and “a complex pitch-rhythm system that correlated the mathematical ratios of the pitches of the overtone series with rhythmic proportions.” (Richard Teitelbaum) Cowell treated the piano as a percussion instrument. Through “prepared piano” techniques, and …
In his “constant, restless search for new avenues of expression,” the eminent Scottish composer, Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959), embraces tradition. MacMillan, whose catalogue includes five symphonies, six operas, a handful of concerti, and numerous sacred choral works, cites Scottish folk music and “the timeless truths of Roman Catholicism” among his influences. His Larghetto for Orchestra transforms the orchestra into a series of choirs, with echoes of ancient plainchant and contemplative liturgical …
Completed in 1807, Beethoven’s Mass in C Major came seventeen years before the premiere of the monumental Missa solemnis. In its way, it is a work which is equally mould-shattering. Beethoven, who seldom attended church, considered music to be “the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life…the one spiritual entrance into the higher world.” His Mass in C Major moves away from dogma to embrace the free, all-encompassing sanctity of the individual. A serene, …
The young J.S. Bach was employed as court organist in Weimar when he composed the tender and intimate chorale prelude, Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein, BWV 641 (“When we are in utmost need”). The brief liturgical interlude is part of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) BWV 599−644, a compilation of 46 chorale preludes, written between 1712 and 1717. Albert Schweitzer commented that the soprano line, heard below as a pastorale reed voice, flows “like a …