El Canto de la Sibila

El Canto de la Sibila

Music and religion, it seems that they are very connected. In an earlier blog, we saw religion being the source of inspiration for great composers like Anton Bruckner. Also the first music captured on paper and so surviving times was the Gregorian Chant, bringing the audience into a state of devoutness.

In 2010 Unesco recognized `El Canto de la Sibila` as intangible cultural heritage. The Song of the Sibyl is a liturgical drama and a Gregorian chant which is performed in allmost all churches of Mallorca and in the Italian city of Alghero at the evening church services on December 24th. Recently, it has been recovered in other locations such as Barcelona and in the Valencian cities of Onteniente, Jaraco and Gandia. 

The chant was introduced all around Europe in the Middle Ages and it reached Majorca with the Christian conquest in 1229. The lyrics compose a prophecy describing the Apocalypse.

The figure of Sibil comes from the time of ancient Greece. There are many persons who are referred to as Sibil and these women were oracles in, for example Delphi. They were incorporated into the Christian Church as their apocalyptic visions included the promise of the second coming of Jesus Christ to judge the world. Michelangelo included Sibil in his beautiful paintings in the Sistine Chapel, so confirming the importance she and her messages had for the church as it leaves nothing to the imagination of what will happen to unbelievers:

The Day of Judgement

will appear For those who have made ​​service.

Jesus Christ, Universal King,

eternal God and true man

Heaven will come to pass judgment

and give to each their just reward.

Great fire will come down from Heaven;

springs and rivers will all burn.

Fish will scream loudly

losing the natural charms

The sun will lose its brightness

becoming dark and veiled.

The moon will give no light

and the whole world will be full of sadness.

To evil people I will say bitterly:

- Go, you damned, into the torment!

Go, go to the eternal fire

With your Prince of Hell

In the present-day performance, a boy or girl sings, accompanied by two or more Altar boys carrying candles. The singer holds a sword upright in front of his or her face during the entire song. The verses are sung in a single voice and without instrumental accompaniment, apart from when the organ plays between the verses. 

It is fascinating to listen and look to the performance of this work, it is as looking back 800 years and easy to imagine the impact it had and still has on the audience in a dark and cold church in the middle of the winter: Believe or Die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg7y-mqqvVk
http://player.qobuz.com/#!/album/0884385733575

Bruckner - Ave Maria

Devote

What kind of a person was Anton Bruckner?. Mahler describes him as half an idiot, half a genius. Very devote, falling in love with teenage girls even at higher age, keeping a photo of his dead mother (as he had no photo from her still alive....). It indeed pictures a remarkable man. Also an insecure man it looks like when it concerns his work. For most of his symphonies we know of many re-writes as Bruckner wanted to please his critics of whom there were many. 

Max Kalbeck, a friend of Brahms wrote in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, February 13, 1883:

The tonal ghosts are altogether too mad: it is as though a pack of wolves met on Walpurgis Night, such stamping and roaring, raging and screaming goes wildly on. If the future can relish such a chaotic piece of music, with sounds echoing from a hundred cliffs, we wish that future to be far away from us.

Where Bruckner had no struggle was with his devotion to God: he believed. Where we see in Mahler searching for God in Nature and in himself and going from assurance to doubt, Bruckner sang of his God and for his God. His 9th symphony was dedicated to God and he hoped He would grant him the time to finish it. Which didn't happen as he had to leave the work unfinished.

Bruckner studied intensively the music of Palestrina and Bach and after working as an organist at the court of Vienna and taken over from his teacher Sechter his professorship at the Vienna Conservatory, he spent his final decades creating his nine symphonies. These symphonies are sometimes refer to as "cathedrals of sound". Mahler expands the scope of the symphony even further - he famously argued with Sibelius that a symphony should contain the universe. - and he created an unmistakably modern musical language by including sounds from the ‘outside world’, using cowbells, military band music, uncommon wind instruments, mandolins and guitars, even vocal soloists and chorus

My choice here is not for one of these complex symphonies but his motet Ave Maria. The work dates from 1861 and features three parts for female and four for male voices. Witzenmann links Bruckner's Ave Maria to four motets of Palestrina one being the Stabat Mater. 

Close your eyes when listening!

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/7744169

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/15521295

Philip Glass - Einstein on the beach

Walk in and out

An opera of 5 hours, too long to stay focused? Well, that is why you are allowed to walk in and out. That is the case with Einstein on the beach, created by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson in 1976. Einstein prepared the way for much of what has happened in music theater since its premiere. 

Glass and Wilson decided to create an opera based around a historical persona. Einstein was selected after they could not agree upon Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler. Albert Einstein was the eventual compromise. The work is one out of serie of three where Glass portraits people whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.


Although i appreciate minimal music for its capability to slow down time, 5 hours is a lot to handle. The little piece I like a lot is the music within the first of the opera's "Knee Plays" which features repeated numbers accompanied by an electric organ. Glass states that these numbers and solfège syllables were used as placeholders for texts by the singers to memorize their parts, and were kept instead of replacing them with texts. This numerical repetition offers an interpretation as a reference to the mathematical and scientific breakthroughs made by Einstein himself. 

Hypnotizing!

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/4781440
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIDuZq7RVAM

Machault - Messe de Notre Dame

Machaut

Messe de Nostre Dame is a beautiful polyphonic mass composed before 1365 by French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377). It is one of the great masterpieces of medieval music and of all religious music. Opposite to the Tournai Mass, it is not a compilation from several composers but created by Guillaume as single composer. 

It is possible that Machaut was familiar with the Tournai Mass. The Gloria and Credo of the Messe de Nostre Dame show similarities to the Tournai mass, such as textless musical interludes, simultaneous style, and long melismatic Amens. The other four movements of Machaut's mass are composed in motet style with mass text.

For me, the Pater Nostre is one of the most lovely pieces, as it reminds me of being as a young kid in the cloister of my uncle, who was a Benedictine monk. Their chant was filling the church the same time as the incense was filling it and the sun entering through the Rose window. Felt like a heavenly experience.

Please also listen to the Introitus with the beautiful bells joining the voices!

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/989650

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/989663

Brahms - Warum

Warum / Brahms

No need to write my own text if it has been done so thoroughly already:

http://www.kellydeanhansen.com/opus74.html.

Brahms achieves with his tempo and dynamics, a heavy emotional load in ´Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen?´. The perfect balance between the motet contrapuntal technique and romantic expression, makes this work one of the absolute highlights of choral literature.

This dramatic powerful music was written in 1877 during a peaceful summer holiday. Not sure how you are going to spend your next holiday?

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/20221682

Heinrich Bach - Ich danke dir, Gott

Heinrich Bach

Was beautiful Sunday over here and even if you are not religious, this music of Henrich Bach expresses well how you can be grateful and not only for the weather.

Heinrich Bach (1615-1692) was the brother of Christoph Bach, who was the grandfather of Johann Sebastian Bach. Heinrich, then on his turn was the grandfather of Maria Barbara Bach, who was the first wife of Johann Sebastian. 

The music seems simpler in its beauty than the complexity i would assume in these relations. Upon his death, he was praised highly as "an organist who touched the heart."

Heinrich Bach's vocal concerto, or cantata, Ich danke dir, Gott is the only vocal work by him which survived. It makes you wonder about the other pieces we do not know....

Mahler - Symphony 3

Mahler Symphony 3:

Lechner about the first movement of the Third Symphony:

That almost ceases to be music; it is practically the sounds of nature. It is eerie how life gradually wrests itself free from the inanimate, rigid matter—I could have named the movement “What the Craggy Mountains Tell Me.” . . . Again, the atmosphere of a stifling heat on a summer midday hangs over the introduction to this movement. Not a breath stirs. All life is suspended. The sun-soaked air shimmers and flickers. I hear it in my mental ear, but how to find the physical tones?s

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/580242

Mahler - Symphony nr. 5

Mahler

The Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, played at funerals, was written as a love letter- another instance of Mahler's writing music that points in opposite ways

Symphony No.5 in C sharp minor : 4. Adagietto (Sehr langsam) 

http://player.qobuz.com/#!/track/528538