A Book of Hours Revisited
Last Winter I had a privilege to premiere a new piano work, A Book of Hours, at The Art Institute of Chicago. The work takes four poems-prayers by Thomas Merton, each attributed to a period of the day: Dawn – Day – Dusk – Dark. As a Trappist monk, Merton was a poet very much interested in the contemporary notion of spirituality and mysticism. His collection of poems, prayers, and reflections, A Book of Hours, mirrors the ancient form of prayers that evolved into daily and weekly cycles of prayers, responses, antiphones, and other spiritual readings.
Each movement in this multi-movement piano mediates on a daily prayer taken from a particular day during the week. As a result, a movement acts as an auditory meditation encapsulated in both the act of performance and listening. Not long ago, I decided to revisit these pieces as to enhance their musical, spiritual, and aesthetic meaning. I am currently working on expanding the work and hope to have it completed by this Spring.
Sink from your shallow, soul, into eternity.
We touch the rays we cannot see.
We feel the light that seems to sing.
(Responsory, Dawn of Monday)
Our hearts are heavens
And our eyes are light-years deep.
Sounding Your will, Your peace, in its unbounded fathoms:
Oh balance all our turning orbits till that morning,
Upon the center and level of Your holy love:
Than lock our souls forever in the nucleus of its Law.
(Prayer, Day of Wednesday)
Justify my Soul, O God,
from Your fountains fill my will with fire.
Shine on my mind, “be darkness to my experience,”
occupy my heart with your tremendous Life.
I will hear your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created.
(Evening Hymn, Dusk of Sunday)
Midnight!
Kissed with flame!
See! See!
My love is darkness!Only in the Void
Are all ways one:Only in the night
Are all lost
Found.In my ending is my meaning.
(from Night Hymn, Dark of Monday)
In a hope to portray the emotional ramifications embedded in some very familiar musical schemas, such as major-minor modalities or conventional piano textures, movements form A Book of Hours capture the flux as well the state of our inner self reflected through the polarities of the positive and negative emotional valences that are evoked and experienced by various musical expectations. In this piano work, I was very interested in exploring the perceptual quality of my newly developed harmonic and rhythmic Sonance Modes in relation to common tonal and metric systems of the Western music theory and practice. My wish was to explore how different scale tones reflect their psychological qualia when organized in a different fashion than the common practice tonal structures. I also wanted to compare how these tone sequence and harmonies relate to each other, especially from the viewpoint of melody, tonality, and meter perception. Of the main interest was the notion of expectancy of the Western listener. Once again, I ventured to discover whether I can express myself through a very personal musical language restrained by some fundamental perceptual condition common to the an average Western listener. What is more, I imagined this piano work almost as a study that would help me incorporate all the theoretical material as to grasp how perception, cognition, culture, compositional modeling, and performance combine to create a piece of music and result in a construction of meaning and emotion in musical experience.
