Celebrating Morten Lauridsen at 80

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O the land of cloudless days,
     O the land of an unclouded sky,
          O  they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise:
               O they tell me of an unclouded day. 

Imagine standing beneath a perfectly clear sky that stretches beyond all bound and feeling your focus yield to its azure endlessness as your body warms, welcoming, unimpeded, unfiltered, the source of all life: light. All living things seem to share some version of this experience. Alpine forests sprout skyward from impossibly steep terrain in perfect verticality to try to touch the sky. Our pets instinctively nestle on sun-warmed sills and bed corners. For humankind, for as long as light has warmed our existence, its significance has been not just physical but also psychic and spiritual. The imagery and symbolism of light and dark pervade secular myth from the sun deities of polytheistic pantheons to Star Wars. Homer’s Odyssey imagines the gods’ home at Mt. Olympus “[abiding] in everlasting sunshine and in a great peacefulness of light, wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever.” Some eight centuries after Homer, light imagery appeared widely in early Christian texts. Unsurprisingly, structures related to spiritual practice have, since the first, been oriented to exploit the changing nature of light as it waxes and wanes through days and seasons. Builders of the Middle Ages famously innovated ways to increase the height of cathedrals and expand the size of their windows for artisans’ ever more dazzling displays that stun us still, even in our age of LED blare and pixelated digital overstimulation. (The cover of our music book for this concert, even, is an image of the rose window of Chartres). Creators of music, too, have sought to capture the essence and effect of light in their art. 

The central work on today’s program is Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna (light eternal). Written in response to his mother’s final illness and passing, Lux Aeterna brought Lauridsen “great comfort and solace in setting to music [these] timeless and wondrous words about Light, a universal symbol of illumination at all levels—spiritual, artistic, and intellectual.”

Few living American composers have captured the imaginations of singers and listeners so completely as Lauridsen has, and even if we weren’t honoring his 80th birthday, his contribution to choral music would be worthy of a celebration. With his works of the mid 1990s he changed the soundscape of American choral music and rekindled enthusiasm among choruses of all kinds. 1994’s O Magnum Mysterium, in particular, introduced an approach to harmony and voicing in choral music that caught the attention and admiration of singers and audiences alike. Though some of his works bear *almost* too close a resemblance to one another with respect to harmony, one can’t deny that this gentle, ingenious composer has hit on something peculiarly effective. 

That something stymies our best attempts to define it. It's ridiculous to describe a sonic medium with photonic adjectives. Nevertheless, since their premieres, O Magnum Mysterium and Lux Aeterna have garnered descriptors such as “luminous” and “shimmering” and have been deemed to bear an “inner radiance.” Lauridsen’s harmonies make synesthetes of even the most linguistically scrupulous among us. In rehearsal, I asked the chorus, “what is the sound of this music?” Alto Melissa Kettner gave my favorite, and the most evocative, answer: “it’s the sound clouds would make if they could sing.” 

The first choral entry in Lux Aeterna provides a characteristic example. A broad and searching introduction establishes, with a deep, low D pedal tone and some gently arcing melodies, the prevailing D major sonority. For the choir’s first entry, rather than voice its chord from the root up, planted firm, with both feet on the ground, Lauridsen sets the chord in inversion, afloat, the main note nestled in the middle of the chord, obscured slightly by an extra “non-chord tone” tucked right up against it. As the choir chants through the opening lyric, its sound floats and morphs as a cloud would, shifting slowly, kaleidoscopically, its color translucent and iridescent. 

But the essence of Lauridsen’s craft lay not just in these chords but in their harmony’s relationship to musical line. He appreciates the inheritance of melodic gift from other American composers such as Barber and Randall Thompson:

I've always admired composers who know what to do with line, and those composers certainly did. I have composed a number of art songs as well, and I have a great love of the American musical theater-the music of Jerome Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, and others. When I give talks about my music, I include those individuals alongside the great song-composers like Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert. The craft of composing elegant melodic lines—so many composers are simply afraid to write one, which I think is regrettable—is something I’ve been honing my entire life.

In Lux Aeterna he marshals his craft with the specific aim of evoking light:

In the Lux Aeterna I harken back to Renaissance procedures, especially those found in the music of Josquin and Palestrina, to set texts that center on the more serene symbol of light. The opening of the Lux Aeterna is like light emerging from the darkness, all against a double pedal in both the low and upper strings. The piece is meant to transport the listener to a place of inner peace, understanding, and enlightenment.

The composer outlines the multi-movement structure of his Lux Aeterna thusly:

The work opens and closes with the beginning and ending of the Requiem Mass, with the central three movements drawn respectively from the Te Deum, O Nata Lux, and Veni, Sancte Spiritus. The instrumental introduction to the Introitus softly recalls motivic fragments from two pieces especially close to my heart (my settings of Rilke’s Contre Qui, Rose and O Magnum Mysterium) which recur throughout the work in various forms. Several new themes in the lntroitus are then introduced by the chorus, including an extended canon on et lux perpetua.

In Te, Domine, Speravi contains, among other musical elements, the cantus firmus “Herzliebster Jesu” (from the Nuremburg Songbook, 1677) and a lengthy inverted canon on “fiat misericordia.” O Nata Lux and Veni, Sancte Spiritus are paired songs, the former an a cappella motet at the center of the work and the latter a spirited, jubilant canticle. A quiet setting of the Agnus Dei precedes the final Lux Aeterna, which reprises the opening section of the Introitus and concludes with a joyful celebratory Alleluia. 

Lauridsen noted elsewhere: “People want to hang on to an idea that ennobles them and gives them courage to carry on. So I simply went to write a beautiful piece on illumination.” 

Today’s concert celebrates another significant voice in American music: that of composer, pianist, and organist, Florence Price. Price held the honor of being the first African American female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony at the World’s Fair in 1933. Though she wrote more than 300 works, many of them lay undiscovered, or at least unknown to contemporary American audiences, until recently. Her work is now receiving the hearings it so richly deserves. The Philadelphia Orchestra, for instance, has championed her symphonies through performances and a GRAMMY-winning recording. Princeton Pro Musica is delighted to present one of her keyboard works in the hands of Princeton University Organist Eric Plutz, with the Suite for Organ No. 1, first premiered in 1942. The colorful, engaging suite unfolds in four sections: Fantasy, Fughetta, Air, and Toccata. The music bears hallmarks of Price’s mature style, which melds into European formal structures African American musical elements: pentatonic melodies redolent of spirituals, jazz- and blues-influenced harmonies, and syncopated rhythms. 

As Lauridsen does, the American composer and songwriter Shawn Kirchner enjoys a longstanding relationship with the LA Master Chorale (including as a member of its tenor section). In 2010, that ensemble premiered his triptych, Heavenly Home. Kirchner’s settings in Heavenly Home are fashioned from three American hymn tunes, each of which imagines heaven as a “home.” “Hallelujah” plays on the circular, slippery nature of its pentatonic melody from the Sacred Harp hymnal, snaking it imitatively among the voice parts and embedding it within freely composed, fantasia-like material. At the heart of the work stands “Angel Band,” William Bradury’s beloved tune, set here within an eight-part, almost symphonic vocal texture. The familiar-sounding tune of Rev. J.K. Alwood’s “Unclouded Day,” spirited and optimistic, gallops along with a knee-slapping rhythmic energy, peaking as the singers imagine “a city that is made of gold.”

For now, at least, none of us can confirm if such a city, such a heavenly home, exists. Until we do, these visions—of illumination, of enlightenment, of heaven—will remain vivid imagined experiences, dreamt-for possibilities. Ultimately, light and sound are both mediums borne on waves to which our bodies are exquisitely tuned, ready to catch before they fade away. Yet music’s ephemerality is at once its limitation and its advantage. Of the countless magnificent musical works created before the invention of audio recording, all that remains is their silent blueprint. To behold their beauty and feel their warmth, they must be recreated, communally. While the clearest of blue skies, the most picturesque clouds, or the most perfectly prismatic beam of light passing through glass can inspire reflection and awe, the creation and appreciation of music helps us feel not just what lies beyond but what resonates between us.