David John Lang

Et misericordia

15/1/2020

I've been reading through the book of Job this month. This brought to mind a piece of music which I haven't heard since May 2013: Et misericordia, by Clare Maclean.

The book of Job made a deep impression on me when I first read it in 2011. I happened to be going through a pretty dark patch of my life at the time, so I felt some kind of solidarity with Job as he called upon God for answers. It's a pretty standard complaint: If God is good and omnipotent, why is there suffering and injustice in the world? I loved that the Bible wasn't shying away from those questions, and I looked forward to getting some answers...

When I got to the last few chapters, in which God responds to Job ("out of the whirlwind"), I was stunned. Instead of providing answers, God bombards Job with a long chain of his own questions:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements, or who stretched the line upon it?
On what do its foundations rest, or who laid its corner stone,
When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

These are the words Clare Maclean starts with (from chapter 38 of Job). The music actually sounds confronting. The opening chords get more and more insistent as the thick, full-voiced harmonies pile up. God declares himself as the unfathomable, unreachable Creator through the awesome scope of the created universe, and we hear it all in the music. Earth, stars, light, darkness, wind and water – all are portrayed with a music that emphasises their mystery and complexity. (Maclean writes for 12-part chorus, often very contrapuntally, so it's not an easy piece.)

The word painting is exquisite. I love the scintillating depiction of “light diffused” and the thick, cloudy, misaligned chords of the sea “shut in with doors”. I'm struck by something new each time I listen. You can hear the composer's wonder at the created natural world in the sheer inventiveness of the music – just like with Haydn's brilliant Creation oratorio, which I listened to last week.

But how does all this awe and wonder answer the question of human suffering?

There is something more. Twice we hear words in Latin, taken from the Magnificat: Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum (“And his mercy extends from generation to generation for those who fear him”). This is a signpost, pointing to the very heart of the work. And here, the overwhelming extravagance of creation is momentarily stilled – “the surface of the deep is frozen,” sings the choir, as the harmony falls in to a single note. And then, just for a moment, the misty counterpoint is cleared away, the foreign harmonies become familiar, and the divine becomes human. The gulf of the ‘unknown’ is bridged: “For I know that my Redeemer lives.”

This text comes from earlier in Job (19:25), a fragment of light and hope in the middle of one of his many impassioned speeches. By placing it here, in the middle of God's speech of chapter 38, and signposted with a quote from the Magnificat, Clare Maclean points to Jesus Christ as Job's longed-for Redeemer.

I love how Clare Maclean has chosen and structured these texts, and then how she's set them to music. The main body of the piece, with text from Job 38, shows God's glory in all its vastness and grandeur, and it's frankly terrifying – he really has made everything. The title and the quote from the Magnificat (Luke 1:50) points us to God's mercy, and our humility before him ("His mercy is for those who fear him"). And at the heart of the work is God's love, in the promise of the Redeemer.

There's way too much depth here for a single blog post. But hopefully I've shown something about how I think this work glorifies God.

Unfortunately for my readers, there doesn't seem to be a readily available recording online. But if you're really inspired to seek it out, you can buy an MP3 recording from the Sydney Chamber Choir here, or find it on one of the Adelaide Chamber Singers' CDs here.

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Glide Path

12/7/2017

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Sam Young is another composer I met in Alaska last year. He was back doing Composing in the Wilderness for a second time, because he had loved it so much in 2015. He lives in Los Angeles, and is a percussionist as well as a composer.

I've been preparing to conduct Sam's piece Glide Path with the Adelaide Wind Orchestra. It's an 8-minute work that Sam composed after his first trip to Alaska. There's no specific narrative to the piece, but Sam tells me that he had many different images of flying running through his head as he wrote it.

In looking back at my own memories of Alaska, flying features a lot. We took a bush plane from Fairbanks to Coal Creek and back, and before the workshop started I went on one of the popular sightseeing flights around Denali (which included landing on a glacier!). And even on the ground, the 24-hour daylight and all the pointy spruce trees had me constantly looking up at the sky in wonder. Perhaps most memorable of all was the golden eagle we all saw up close as we sat collecting inspiration on a hilltop in Denali National Park.

I love flying. And I love Sam's piece.

You know that sleep-deprived restless energy you get on a long flight to a new place? That's what Glide Path reminds me of. It sounds so bright, so free. It begins with loose fragments of music tossed playfully around the orchestra, and although there's a cool 5-beat groove that gets going a little later on, the music never feels like it completely settles down – which I love! It's just constantly overflowing with nervous energy and excitement!

I really admire how Sam has orchestrated it – there's often a lot going on, but the music always has this lightness to it, even when the full orchestra is playing. And that's how it flies.

Halfway through Glide Path, the bouncy rhythms stop, and there's this sudden sense of stillness and solitude. Clarinets and bassoons begin to gently pulsate a 'floating' suspended chord, and fragments of the themes are interwoven in half-tempo.

Sam explains that this section was inspired by his overnight flight home from Fairbanks in 2015. I had a similar experience in 2016...

Many of the Fairbanks flights leave sometime after midnight, but because it's the middle of summer, the sky is still light. So after take-off, everyone closes their window shades to get some sleep. You try to sleep too, but your mind is still spinning with all your adventures. So a few hours later, as everyone around you drowses, you slide up your window shade... and you look out silently on majestic, snow-covered mountains, lit by the morning sun!

That quiet, dreamy sense of wonder is beautifully expressed by this section of the music. It builds up in a very gradual crescendo, which includes my favourite part of all – listen out for the horns and euphonium! :)

That middle section melts away peacefully, and then the restless adventure music returns, bringing the piece to a quick and exciting close – short enough to keep you wishing for more!

There's no publicly available recording of Glide Path yet, but you can check out some of Sam Young's other music on his website or his SoundCloud page (my personal favourites are Glimpses of Stars and Drifting out to Sea). Or better yet, come along to the Adelaide Wind Orchestra concert this Saturday night to hear the Australian premiere! Tickets are available here or at the door.

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Ostara's Equinox

11/7/2017

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While Composing in the Wilderness in Alaska in July 2016, I asked my fellow composers (a.k.a. the Nine Wolves) if they had written anything for wind orchestra.

We were sitting in a cabin at Coal Creek, deep in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and miles away from anything so much as a road. Rain and mosquitoes took turns at keeping us indoors.

Cassie To, the other Aussie in the group, got out her laptop, and I had a listen to Ostara's Equinox...

What I love about this music is how it grows.

At the start, all is still and dark. Clarinets provide a kind of soil-bed for the piece, an empty garden plot of A-flat major. And into this the flutes plant a little seed of music - just three notes, close together and very quiet...

At first, nothing seems to happen. The clarinets murmur quietly to themselves. The flutes throw in a few more of the same seeds. And then the music begins to grow.

It grows in strength, it grows in size, but most of all it grows in energy. More and more instruments come in, the tempo gradually increases, and that three-note flute motif begins to proliferate all around the orchestra. I love how easy that motif is to spot, and yet at the same time how thick and complex the music becomes. Soon it's like the dense foliage of a tree, where all the individual leaves are more or less the same, but together they create an elaborate pattern of beautifully messy greenness.

The spacious stillness of the opening is replaced by a forward-leaning rhythm as the music gradually accumulates an almost unstoppable momentum. By the end, the seed has grown into a huge tree. The last thing we hear is that opening flute motif, now full-grown on the trumpets...

Cassie named this piece Ostara's Equinox in reference to the goddess of spring and fertility (traditionally celebrated during the vernal equinox). The 'equinox' of the title also suggests a perfect balance between darkness and light.

As I listened to this at Coal Creek, I thought about the abundance of life that was all around us. Like many people, I went to Alaska thinking of white, snowy landscapes with very little life. But that's only one side of the story – the winter side, when there is ice everywhere, and barely any sun. A completely different side of Alaska is seen during the summer – the Yukon flows swiftly, the sunlight is constant, and there is so much green, so much life, all around.

How does one become the other? Ostara's Equinox charts the journey beautifully, from darkness to light.

It was written well before either of us had been to Alaska, but in my memory it is now associated with that cabin at Coal Creek, and the feeling of life's massive, ongoing presence in the spruce forest just outside the door.

Cassie wrote this for a workshop with the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony a few years ago, and the recording (above) was made in a 30-minute reading session. But this weekend I'm honoured to be conducting its world premiere – the Adelaide Wind Orchestra will be performing it as the opening piece of our concert 'Aurora Awakes', and we've had much more time to prepare! Further details and tickets are available here.

UPDATE:
The concert was a success, and now there is a performance recording available to listen to online!

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Hear my prayer

3/7/2017

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This is one of my favourite pieces of music.

It's by Henry Purcell, and it's a setting of the first verse of Psalm 102:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee.

There are heaps of recordings of it on YouTube, but here's one I found that has hardly any views so far, and which I really like. Have a listen.

Sorry about the cough that happens part way through!

Although I kind of like that, because it makes it seem more real and down-to-earth, which this music is. Sure, I know it's addressed to God, and the eight-part counterpoint is incredible. But it's a very human cry, and one I can relate to.

I've been hearing this piece every night for the past few weeks as the introduction to the Examen prayer I do before I go to sleep (thanks to a handy phone app). I find that it has been very helpful in reminding me that I can come before God as I am, however I'm feeling. Even if my feelings are as dissonant as that harmony in the penultimate bar!

In listening to this piece, and joining with it in spirit, I am able to lay down my whole, true self at the Lord's feet.

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One chord

3/7/2017

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For my first ever post on this blog, which is going to be devoted to music that I love, I'd like to start with one of the pieces that first captivated me.

When I was five or six, a family friend from up the street gave us an LP of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. I had no idea what they were singing about, but this music utterly transfixed me.

I listened to it so many times that eventually I could play the whole thing through in my head from memory (carefully observing the correct number of repeats!). When I say "in my head," this usually involved some form of vocalisation as well... my brother likes to recount how I sometimes kept him awake at night with my "orchestra noises!" I also wanted to join in with the recording, and would spend happy afternoons assembling my own percussion section from saucepans, laundry buckets and other household objects so I could play along. And to this day, I still think Carmina Burana has the best ever percussion parts!

But as much as I have always loved the "loud bits", nowadays my favourite moment in the score is this...

It doesn't seem like much, but that is one of my favourite chords ever. The soft, low strings, with muted horns and a bass clarinet for some subtle added depth. And then the celesta, oboes and piccolos to ping out the same chord, softly, two octaves up.

And what's the baritone singing about? "Day, night and everything is against me, the chattering of maidens makes me weep." This is the chord on "makes me weep". How appropriate.

There are heaps of brilliantly orchestrated chords out there. This is just one of them. But I like it a lot.

I have always liked music, ever since Dad (apparently) played Mahler to me in the cot. But something about Carmina Burana really got me deep down and excited me as nothing had before. Yet that was only the beginning. There was so much more beautiful music I was still to discover!

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Et misericordia

Glide Path

Ostara's Equinox

Hear my prayer

One chord

Audio Divina

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