Manhattan Choral Ensemble discussion forum
On June 8, 2007, the Manhattan Choral Ensemble, Tom Cunningham, director, premiered my The Whole World Was Listening, a new work they commissioned from me as part of their New Music for New York commissioning project. Each year, the MCE commissions four composers to write short works, and then selects one of those composers to receive a larger commission to be completed the following year. I was selected for the larger commission, to be premiered June 8, 2008.
Commissions can range a wide scale of possibilities in terms of how collaborative or not they are. Tom and I agreed that it would be a fruitful experience for all involved if the choir members, Tom and I had a sort of ongoing dialogue before and during the process of the new piece’s creation. The performers can gain some intimacy with the process and hopefully feel a more powerful sense of ownership of the outcome. Since I am currently living in Latvia, we decided to set up a forum here on my website where we can exchange ideas. We can discuss directions to take the piece, possible texts, and I can post preliminary drafts as the piece evolves over time. I suppose a suitable analogy is with cooking. I’ll still be the cook, but I welcome all suggestions for ingredients and spices.
The context for the commission is that I am to write a new work that will be included on a concert of Rachmaninoff’s choral masterpiece, Vespers, or All Night Vigil. Vespers will be divided in the performance into two halves, and my piece will be premiered in that space in the middle.
I’ll take the first plunge into the conversation. My initial thoughts are taking me in several possible and very divergent directions:
1. No matter what the language, the text should be spiritual in nature, as befitting its role alongside Vespers. As far as I’m concerned, the text could be sacred or secular with a typical surrogate subject such as spirituality in nature or spiritual love. Given an entire concert in Russian, the only language I’d like to avoid is Russian, though I suppose if the right one came along, I could be persuaded to change my mind about that. Right now, my instincts are telling me, as far as languages go, to start with either (sacred) Latin, English (for obvious reasons), French (a personal intersection - I am a bit of a Francophile; and there is a long historical relationship between France and Russia (or at least Paris and Russian artists), and indeed, Rachmaninoff was the first president of the Conservatoire Russe de Paris, which later was renamed the Conservatoire Rachmaninoff) or Gaelic (partly because of my ancestry, I find the traditional music and language of the Irish people extremely moving and spiritual).
2. I am unsure which strategy is best here, but I ask myself the question of whether to deal with Rachmaninoff directly or skirt the issue altogether? If directly: this past summer in Paris I heard some intriguing music, where two different composers took Bach Preludes from the WTC and wrote vocalises over them. Like a palimpsest, I wonder if I could take, for example, a Rachmaninoff piano prelude and write, for example, a Sanctus over it. Alternatively, since Rachmaninoff based 10 of the 15 movements of Vespers on Russian, Greek or Ukrainian chant, I could (or should?) use the same starting point.
3. Skirting the issue altogether. Vespers can easily be seen as an expression of Rachmaninoff’s Russianism or pride in his homeland. As an American living abroad, honestly, I have given up on trying to dispel the image people here hold of Americans (*Sigh*. Thanks, Bush. Thanks, Hollywood.) or to communicate what it really means to be American. I wish I could sit people down here to listen to several hours of This American Life. Maybe then they’d have an inkling. I could, therefore, conceivably set, for example, Robert Frost or (Tom’s favorite) Walt Whitman, two quintessentially American poetic voices. If I were to set a secular poem, however, it would need to be short, because it would allow for the kind of emotional expansion befitting the occasion.
That’s where my thoughts have taken me so far. I look forward to yours.
~Charlie
January 10th, 2008 at 6:20 am
I’m back from my trip to New York and thinking more about this. Tom — do you have any idea how I might locate the chant sources that Rachmaninoff used?
January 27th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I am glad that you are considering referring to Rachmaninoff and perhaps the chants that he sourced for the Vespers. I have always been intrigued by interpretations of similar works by different composers. Because of the placement of your composition in the program, I think it would draw the entire performance together to use various motifs from the original composition. The Vespers do come across as an expression of his Russianism and I think it would be amazing to create a piece, with lyrics in English, about what it means to you to be an American. This would also tie the performance together but in an entirely different way.
Although, I certainly would be intrigued to perform a piece in another language that felt equal to the Vespers in its spirituality. I can’t decide what strikes me more when I listen to the Vespers- the Russianism or the spirituality.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comment. Here’s where I am now: I have had difficulty finding a score of the Vespers, much less been able to find the specific chants that Rachmaninoff used. I’d very much like to find them, if only to study a little what his process was of getting from the chants to the finished work. Anyway, I have found several collections of Znammeny Chants, and found a Communion Chant I like. The one I found had an English translation that seemed, well, too clunky or trite for my taste. I decided to use the chant with the Latin text Lux Aeterna. I’ve begun writing the piece now. Perhaps I will post the source chant soon. Stay tuned.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:47 am
The Lux aeterna text should make for an interesting tie-in to the Vespers service of daily offices spanning dusk to dawn!
February 1st, 2008 at 1:57 pm
That sounds great! I was a little worried about what it would be like to insert your piece in the middle of our Vespers concert, but it sounds like there is going to be a lot of thematic and generic overlap.
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 am
Here is a portion of the Znammeny Chant I’m using. It goes on with an Alleluia that I might or might not use.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:59 am
The piece is coming along well, I think. I thought I’d post the first 8 pages so you can give it a look here.