San Antonio Chamber Choir
Unifying light on divided divinities
May 25, 2011What does divinity sound like? In Timothy Kramer’s new “Lux caelestis,” centerpiece of a San Antonio Chamber Choir concert on May 22 in the Basilica of the Little Flower, divinity sounds like the union of consonance and dissonance. Which seems about right.
“Lux caelestis,” or “celestial light” in Latin, consists of five movements whose texts, all of them about light and the divine, are drawn from the Hebrew, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu and Christian traditions and sung in the original languages. The composer’s program note cites a poem by Rumi to encapsulate the universalist premise of the work. The Sufi poet wrote, in part:
All religions, all
this singing
One song
The differences are just
Illusion and vanity.
One song
The differences are just
Illusion and vanity.
Mr. Kramer, who left his faculty post at Trinity University last year to become chair of the music department at Illinois College, returned to town for the premiere. Speaking about the work before the choir performed it under artistic director Scott MacPherson, Mr. Kramer noted that several musical leitmotifs connect the movements. Among them is the "god chord,” heard on the Latin word “Domine” in the Christian “Lux aeterna” and, somewhat altered, on the word “Elohim” in the Hebrew “Yehi-or” from Genesis. (“Lux aeterna” was originally composed as a standalone piece and was given its premiere by the Trinity chamber Singers under Mr. MacPherson in 2004.)
Looking at the score, one finds the devil all over the "god chord.” In the “Lux aeterna,” the word “Domine” (Lord) begins with the sopranos and altos, both divided, singing two tritones a major second apart. The tritone interval used to be regarded as “the Devil in music,” and the major second is a fairly dissonant interval on its own. Then the divided tenors add another tritone to the mix while the divided basses sing a godly consonant fifth -- the notes G-D, of course. The result is bracing and strikingly beautiful, neither trivially stable nor trivially unstable, but seeming to reach beyond itself to embrace the whole spectrum of harmony -- a theological treatise in a chord. The parallel passage on “Elohim” in the first movement is a shade less luminous, but the idea is the same.
Each of the movements is influenced in part by the relevant musical culture, and though the general mood is serene there are variations in character. The Zoroastrian “At toi Atrem” begins with a quick, importunate invocation. Much of the Buddhist “Pabhassara Sutta” is energetic and closes with an effect like swinging bells. The harmonies are relatively plain in the Hindu “Gayatri Mantra,” which opens with overlapping chants of “Aum” in which the G-D from the “god chord” appears again.
With its generally dense harmonies, difficult pronunciations and occasional special effects, “Lux caelestis” is a difficult work to sing, and the professional San Antonio Chamber Choir did a first rate job by it.
The choir was on similarly firm ground, apart from some brief lapses in ensemble precision, in the program’s other major work, Benjamin Britten’s daunting “Hymn to St. Cecilia.” Set to a poem by W.H. Auden, the piece holds childlike simplicity and and prickly sophistication in equipoise, rather like Britten's "Ceremony of Carols. A refrain recalls traditional church styles. The excellent soloists were drawn from the choir’ ranks; special notice goes to high soprano Rebecca Muñiz for a pure, straight sound (like a boy soprano) that seemed ideally suited to Britten’s aesthetic.
Shorter works, all in a fairly conservative modern idiom and exceptionally lovely, were Imant Raminsh’s “Come, My Light,” Morten Lauridsen’s “O nata lux” and Andrew Rindfleisch’s “Careless Carols,” to a gentle text by Rabindranath Tagore.
Mike
Greenberg
