“Veni Sancte Spiritus,” the first section from my Vespers, showed up on The Early Music Show April 21st on BBC Radio 3. Lucie Skeaping profiled Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, and among Weelkes, Finck, and Susato, there I am, with Joan, Bob, and The Crossing. Thanks, BBC, thanks, Piffaro!
How hard could it be to write a unison choral piece? How about a piece for unrehearsed singers—not a choir— who get only one shot at it?
Well, that’s much of church music, the congregational singing part of it, anyway. I’ve written many hymns for just this situation, but with those you at least get multiple verses to figure things out. With service music, such as a Mass, you go though it once and, until a week later, that’s it.
The Association of Anglican Musicians commissioned me to write music for the Closing Eucharist of their National Conference in Philadelphia, June 17–22, 2012. I completed it about a month and a half ago, and after field-testing and tweaking, sent the unison congregation part to the printer yesterday for inclusion in the bulletin.
The Mass for Philadelphia will be sung during the Closing Eucharist, 3:30 pm Thursday, 21 Jun 2012, at St. Luke and The Epiphany, Philadelphia. Assisting in the congregational singing will be a massed children’s choir from churches in the greater Philadelphia area. The Mass is for unison congregation, organ, and optional cantor and descant.
Actually, the congregation for this premiere will be mostly musicians, of course, and will include many fine singers (or those like me, who are just bold singers), but we’re hoping for this to be the start of many more opportunities for its use by all sorts of churches, big and small. I’ll also be an exhibitor at the Conference, bringing along lots of my choral music, including full scores of this Mass.
My deepest thanks to Phillip and Heather Shade and the AAM.
My most recent anthem, Come, Gather All, is mentioned in the March 2012 issue of The American Organist, the publication of the American Guild of Organists. (Page 31… my picture… Jackie thinks I’m squinting…)
I just received the recording of the Mass for which it was commissioned: It was the 100th Anniversary of St. Eleanor Church, Collegeville, Pa., and the celebrant was the new Philadelphia Archbishop, Charles J. Chaput.
My thanks to Paul Berchtold, who wrote the text, to Music Director Dan Weckerly, to Mark and Donna Pinto, and to everyone in the choir who put this together. Moderately easy, SATB, organ, opt. brass quartet. More information here.
In “Masterpiece brings packed house Sunday to Hill church,” Michael Caruso called the 2008 premiere of Vespers “a masterpiece of composition within the context of religious devotion,” singling out as “most impressive” my “commitment to the powerful traditions of German Lutheran piety as expressed in music.”
He then says about Sunday’s (Jan. 8th) performance, that the “marvel of Smith’s music is found in its ability to sound both old and new at one and the same time. The timbres of Piffaro’s Renaissance instruments and the straight-tone singing of The Crossing recall the music of centuries ago, as does Smith’s sophisticated use of contrapuntal techniques.”
Caruso rightly praises Donald Nally, who “elicited flawless singing and exuberant playing from his musicians.”
David Patrick Stearns compares Monteverdi and me. He went to recent performances of a “Vespers” (not 1610), put together from later Monteverdi works by the Green Mountain Project, and my Vespers, and believes that both the master and I resolve dichotomies by bringing “enemies together.”
Monteverdi brought a new kind of music—less contrapuntal, more operatic—into the Church. My piece comes from someone Stearns describes as an “ultra-devout” composer who writes “almost anti- evangelical,” or not preachy, music. It “speaks to him without histrionics.”
“There’s absolutely no guile or strategy behind it…. There’s plenty of joy – though not with anything as superficial or as potentially vulgar as jubilation. Smith’s Magnificat is full of wonderful canonic writing that has a simple, straightforward effect – achieved through a complexity of means that could only be the work of an extremely accomplished composer… De-dramatized, de-politicized spiritually-oriented music is no stranger to admirers of Arvo Pärt. But even at his most secular, Pärt seems to echo, however distantly, the asceticism of the Eastern Orthodox Church. If Smith is writing for a church, it’s one without walls.”
I don’t know what that means, though people of all faiths have told me marvelous things about their experiences listening to it. I see, simply, a Lutheran Vespers, a traditionally formed Christian work with Psalms, hymns, a Lord’s Prayer, and so on. What I tried to put in it was what I have felt from the inside: the power of a chant, of a hymn, that churns and overwhelms. Many, many greater ones than I feel this, the saints from books, the saints who I sit next to. He says it speaks to his “integration-starved soul.” I bow my head at those kind words.
Tom Purdom likes Vespers even more the second time around, in the Broad Street Review. Giving well-deserved raves to all the musicians for a performance that “actually exceeded” the premiere, he says, “the real basis of its success was the quality of Smith’s work. You can listen to first-class pieces more than once because they evoke deep feelings and present you with music so varied and complex that you hear new things every time you listen to them.”
He describes “a deeply spiritual quality from beginning to end,” saying that “variety and complexity” carry the piece with imagination, marveling, again, at the genius of the musicians to pull it off.
Having written, most of my life, simple music for amateur choirs, it’s an irony to have complexity singled out. In any case, I believe in writing for the musicians, and I’m delighted to no end that Vespers is such a great match for the superlative forces of Piffaro and The Crossing.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Webster reviews Vespers in the first of its three 2012 reprise concerts. He calls it “a tangy, new-old gloss on a historic form” becoming, in German and Latin, “like musical conversation among friends.”
He writes that “Smith’s harmonic vocabulary ranges widely, demands keen ears, and gives vitality to texts that can invite routine. A single voice, moving in consonance, is joined by another on an edgily different route, then by others until the vision emerges of a crowd jostling, before a resolution unpredictably appears. No assumptions can be rewarded in this writing, for surprise is everywhere.”
He points to the weaving of lines, voices, textures, and dynamics that “craftily prepare for the work’s climax, in the Magnificat, to reach a doubly dramatic forte. That section, beginning with single high soprano voices, grew to a tumult, and included historical musical references and gestures to summarize the entire work’s premise.”
He rightly praises Piffaro and The Crossing for their work in creating the “sonic novelty” of transparency and ever-changing mixtures. “Piffaro’s seven musicians play so many instruments that it is, by turns, a discrete group of plucked strings, a sweet wind ensemble, or even a rowdy band of sackbuts stomping through the fields. To hear a finely tuned interval in the voices supported by a small harp, guitar, and theorbo is to stand near the center of music itself.”
And again, “Piffaro’s players are magicians in stirring fresh sounds for the work…. Listeners could hear every line and interval within that transparent singing.”
Webster continues, “the color and densities of the setting of Herr Christ, der einig Sohn, and Psalm 27 anchored the structure of the whole. Smith’s music seems to rejoice in meeting old forms and greeting them like new friends.”
