NagyMusic

St. Michael’s Lessons and Carols

St. Michael im Old Town’s choir, Schola Cantorum
Zvonimir Nagy, Organist and Choirmaster

Selections from the program (concert recording):

Tu scendi dalle stelle, St. A. M. de’ Liguori
Leah Wilhelm, soprano; Margaret Stoltz, alto; Stephen Noon, tenor; Aaron Warell, bass.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Adam Lay Ybounden, J. Ireland
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jesu, Thou The Virgin Born, G. Holst
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum; Leah Wilhelm, soprano solo

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In Dulci Jubilo, M. Praetorius
Henriët Fourie and Leah Wilhelm, sopranos; Margaret Stoltz and Karianne Wardell, altos; Matthew Newlin and Brian-Alwyn Newland, tenors; Ryan O’Maley and Aaron Wardell, basses.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For Unto Us a Child Is Born, G. F. Handel
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Virgin-Born, We Bow Before You, L. Bourgeois
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Quia Respexit, J. S. Bach
Henriët Fourie, soprano

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

O Magnum Mysterium, T. L. de Victoria
Henriët Fourie, soprano; Sarah Ponder, alto; Matthew Newlin, tenor; Aaron Wardell, bass

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sonoris Vocibus, Z. Nagy (premiere)
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Carol of the Bells, M. Leontovich
St. Michael’s Schola Cantorum

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Chord as cloud, harmony as spirit

In recent years, my main interest as a composer and performer has been to explore how and in what ways a piece of music can transcend mere pitches in order to evoke the inner life of our being through its musical morphology, structural relations, and formal design. As a composer, I continue to imagine musical objects that could be realized in a rather intangible or ethereal way, almost reflecting the structure of our very soul. This article gives a brief summary of my current explorations of sound structures, musical harmony, and spirituality in music, as well as some indications of their conceptual and perceptual interdependence.

A very known element of musical vocabulary – the chord, is often represented by sustained pitches that fuse into a solid block, and whose musical development can result in the addition or subtraction of individual tones from the evolving pitch aggregation. The result is some sort of a cloud-like texture or sound mass. In this notion of ‘harmonic clouds’, the statistical clouds of individual tones (i.e., pitches) often act as sonic particles or micro-events, and in turn ask for some sort of statistical processes in which the set of elements used in the texture is kept constant or evolving. Other well-known attributes of cloud textures are: density (number of events within a given time period; sparse scatterings/dense scintillations); statistical evolution with specific morphologies: amplitude (crescendi/decrescendi); internal tempo (accelerando/rallentando); density (transparency of the material: increasing/decreasing; disintegration/coalescence); harmonicity (pitch/chord/cluster/noise); spectrum (high/mid/low). (Roads, 2001)

The notion of harmony as what I would call a spiritual extension of sonic resonance has been a concern of music composition from the early days of the twentieth-century. A number of composers and theorists attempted to describe and classify the compositional morphology and structural processes affecting the “approach to sound materials and musical structures which concentrates on the spectrum of available pitches and their shaping in time.” (Smalley, 1986) For a detailed overview of what seems to be a fascinating insight to both electronic and acoustic modes of composition that is “based entirely on the way sound-objects have, inherent within their perceptual qualities, the potential for building gestures, shapes and forms”, please consult Smalley’s article. While inspired by the concepts from electroacoustic music (this very brief overview of musical constituents and structures, or spectro-morphological materials and techniques is drawn from the domain of electro-acoustic music and timbre perception), this compositional approach can be applied to conventional musical instruments as well. As a result, the manipulation of acoustical instruments is best seen in forming musical gestures, with “the spectral shapes and shape-sequences created by the energy of physical and vocal articulation.” (Ibid.) In turn, these spectral shapes and processes resemble the above-mentioned cloud taxonomy and transformation.

Spectral typology refers to how pitches are combined to form different sound types; the formation of spectral types into various temporal patterns is then understood in terms of spectral morphology. The theoretical framework of spectral typology can be broken into three main categories: note (note proper, harmonic spectrum, inharmonic spectrum), node, noise. As Smalley illustrates, each in turn leads to spectral morphologies, interplay of motion and time, and a number of structural processes encompassing gestures and textures, structural functions and relationships.

These various techniques for organizing harmonic and rhythmic material have shown themselves to be a potent source of musical ideas, both in composition and analysis. I hope to continue exploring these concepts, especially in my future articles and compositions. It seems to me that resonance with its notion of spectro-morphology offers a mystical resemblance to clouds of our inner self. It ranges from being almost invisible or transparent to very present or opaque. Metaphorically represented in sound, it becomes an extenstion of our very human existence. One of my recent works, a piano piece …of the lake in its own way illustrates a desire for this reciprocity of clouds and resonance-like harmonies.

In his recent book entitled “The Reinvention of Religious Music”, Sander Van Maas juxtaposes spectrality with spirituality. The comparison is rooted in his analysis and description of the effects of dazzlement in Messiaen’s music, a phenomenon often achieved by the complex manipulation of pitch and timbral combinations. “These are the complex, sometimes saturated timbres that Messiaen ascribes ‘a certain mystery’ to and which he uses for evoking the strange and miraculous [,...]” (Vas Mass, 2009). It is perhaps this, at first unfathomable nature of musical harmony, that is mirrored in the “natural resonance of sonorous bodies” and reflected in a unique experience of the invisible but living spirit (Messiaen, 1977). As Messiaen states again,

“To hear the sounds of the invisible on the earth is an extraordinary joy, a kind of knowledge of the beyond through music — And what a marvelous opportunity for composer! But a dangerous opportunity, for the music definitely must be quite beautiful.” (Messiaen, 1994).

The impetus for this reflection on composition, harmony, and spirituality was to question if one could understand the concept of sound-resonance in the same way we apprehend the body-soul problem. Could this musical resonance be compared then to a spiritual resonance, or even as some ethereal cloud-like objects, being only able to reveal itself in a form of the invisible sound vibrations? Is it possible, at least in our human language of music to express those ineffable and still beyond words concepts and sentiments of the inner self and its relation to the divine? I do not know if I could successfully answer this, or even more, draw a fine line between these concepts. What I know for certain is that it is inspiring to look for harmony in music that reverberates with the spirit of our existence. “Resonance alone does not suffice, however. The composer will have to (and want to) deploy this phenomenon” (Van Mass, 2009).

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.