NagyMusic

Invocation – A Meditation For Orchestra

A couple of years ago, while admiring that eclectic elegance and aura of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, I drafted a poem, or as a matter of fact, a prayer that would eventually inspire a modest organ work composed during my graduate work at Northwestern. This organ work entitled, Invocation, represents my initial attempts in creating a personal harmonic language inspired at the time by captivating psycho-acoustical principles, as well as by a desire to portray an experience of prayer through sound.

in the air
of hope
my
prayer
for
your
calmness
and love beyond

As part of my work as a musician I spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on the sacred. I often ask myself that ubiquitous and venerated question, “Is it possible to depict something so complex, grand, and mysterious like the divine through music?” At first sight, it seems to me that one is able to at least [re]create a ‘musical’ experience that would bring people closer to the ‘feelings’ of meditation and prayer. After all and when in doubt, it is also good to turn to other musicians for inspiration who arguably sought to express a similar musical experience. As Christoph Wolff in his remarkable tome on Bach’s biography, J. S. Bach: A Learned Musician, states,

Bach’s compositions, as the exceedingly careful musical elaborations that they are, may epitomize nothing else that the difficult task of finding himself an argument for the existence of God — perhaps the ultimate goal of his musical science.” (p. 339)

Recently, I expanded Invocation into a work for symphony orchestra. While it undoubtedly bears formal and structural resemblance to its origin, this new piece is a work in its own right, crafted to the requirements of a large orchestra while still keeping its very personal quality. You can view a score excerpt here:

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.

Valences

Valences, three movements for pipe organ solo, suggest three contrasting musical objects, each with its own musical and emotional dichotomies of their intrinsic positive – attractive, or negative – aversive valence. In other words, these three movements explore various polarities of specific cognitive percepts that are characterized by specific musical structures. For instance, positive valenced states are evoked by relatively consonant harmony and periodic harmony and rhythm, while negative valence can be observed in the same structures that become more inharmonious or convoluted. Very often, process structures are employed in order to generate a form that interpolates between the poles of periodic-aperiodic rhythm, harmonicity-aharmoniciy of harmony, and slow-fast tempi.

The work was completed in the Fall of 2009. Each of the three movements gradually builds up the atmosphere of a musical ritual through the use of both individual and combination stops. The first movement, while scored as a spiral canon, resembles the texture of a Baroque organ trio sonata; the meditative and reflective melodic patterns permeate the second movement; the last division of the work echoes a virtuosic toccata-like writing with recognizable melodic fragments from the first movement played in the pedal part.

In this score, I wanted to capture the flux as well the state of our inner self that is reflected through the polarities of positive and negative emotional valence, in a hope to portray the emotional ramifications embedded in some very familiar musical schema and expectations. I was very interested in the perceptual quality of newly discovered harmonic and rhythmic sonance modes, as well as how selected tones and harmonies relate to each other, especially from the viewpoint of melody, harmony, and rhythm perception. If this new organ work can reveal the excitement and potential of some fundamental perceptual schemas in music composition and performance, I will have more than accomplished my goal.

VALENCES, three movements for organ
1. Slow

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2. Moderate

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3. Fast

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