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Certainly, the overtly religious roots of much Western music in plainchant and polyphony--the latter in particular providing an aural counterpart to both the architecture that housed Christianity and the scholasticism that attempted to make sense of it--remained even as music moved out of churches and into concert halls. J.S. Bach's B-minor Mass, a sacred work, is spiritual, but his cello suites are no less so for being profane and rooted in dance. (In Yo-Yo Ma they have an evangelist.) Spirit pervades music so thoroughly that it is perhaps most notable in its absence--in elevator music, or in what New Yorker critic Alex Ross calls "Windham Hill piano goo." Lately, there are signs of resurgent interest in the spiritual in music, most obviously in the movement of music out of halls and back into churches. The "God Squad"--Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener--have in similar ways reached into the religious musical past in writing contemporary, and exceedingly popular, compositions. Modern liturgical music thrives at the hands of a great many other composers as well. But spiritual currents run wider than strictly religious ones, and musical evocations of spirit come from many places other than houses of worship: powwows, the Alaskan bush, the Gorlitz Stalag. From such disparate sources come the works in "Evocations of the Spirit," the season-ending concert of the Third Angle New Music Ensemble. The intriguing program is divided into three parts: "Invocation," "Meditation" and "Revelation." The first features three sections presented without interruption, beginning with Native American prayers and music presented by Ed Edmo and Arlie Neskahi, two of the region's best-known Native American performers. It continues with three percussion quartets by Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, from a theatrical collaboration with writer Barry Lopez called Coyote Builds North America. A former symphony percussionist, Adams draws inspiration from sounds in the landscape. In these thrilling pieces, his "sonic geography," while solidly rooted in musics of North America, evokes others far away, including the insistent, richly textured sound of the Indian tabla and the tone and cadences of the shakuhachi. The invocation ends with Alan Hovhaness' Mysterious Horse Before the Gate, for trombone and five percussionists. "Meditation," the second section, consists solely of Estonian composer Pärt's 1977 Fratres for violin and piano. A remarkable work distinguished by its weightlessness and suspension of time, it achieves its effect through seemingly simple minimalist schemas of repetition and cycles of metrical augmentation. A later version for 12 cellos, which to my knowledge has not been performed locally, beautifully illustrates its ineffable energy, a mesmerizing near-stasis between gravity and grace. The remainder of the program, "Revelation," features one of the masterpieces of the 20th century: Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote it in 1940, where he was imprisoned at Stalag 8A in Gorlitz, having been captured while serving with the French forces. Though he is best known for this chamber work, he was not a chamber composer; he scored the quartet for piano, clarinet, violin and cello because those were the instruments available in the camp. It is a set of meditations on a passage from the 10th chapter of the Revelation of John, in which an angel relates to John that "By him that liveth for ever and ever, who created Heaven, and all the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished." Quartet for the End of Time is organized in seven movements, seven being the biblically perfect number of the days of Genesis, the churches of Asia, the angels of the revelation and the seals of the book whose opening ushers in the Apocalypse. Through occasional glacial tempos and the repetition of rhythmic motifs, Messiaen elicits the eternal from the temporal in a way that might be merely dark and disorienting were it not for the shimmering brilliance of the orchestration and the peace and calm of the slow movements. It is a fitting end to the program, encompassing in a sense the works before it: the percussive drive, fury and celebration of the Invocation, and the timeless meditativeness of Fratres. It takes a step beyond, however, in its reference to song, which though it is attributed in the movements' titles to angels and to birds has a distinctively human quality. It is a reminder that the spiritual in music is ultimately human, that it is from ourselves that spirit sings and within ourselves that it, like Messiaen, is imprisoned. |
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