Mr. Smith has managed to take several elements I’ve come to love (German and Latin liturgical music, modern choral writing, renaissance instruments and counterpoint) and turn them into one interesting and beautiful work. He plays with an amazing variety of voicing combinations, for instance a rather exciting three-part canon in the Magnificat. This one-of-a-kind work has both strong echoes of the ancient and modern in wonderful juxtaposition, and is well worth the listen!
The Rev. Paul J. Cain reviews Vespers in the Liturgy, Hymnody, and Pulpit Quarterly Book Review, whose motto is: Critical reviews (by Lutheran pastors and church musicians) of books and other resources for Christian worship, preaching, and church music from a perspective rooted in Holy Scripture, the Lutheran Confessions and good common sense. LHP Quarterly Book Review asks, “Is it worth the money to buy, the time to read, the shelf space to store, and the effort to teach?”
…anexceptionaltreat… a modern restatement of Renaissance-era wind bands for a sacred context… a fusion of the 16th Century and our 21st. I think Dr. Luther would be at home and J. S. Bach would appreciate what was going on… one hears a transcendent heavenly setting of “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright”… Psalm 113 completes the trilogy of psalms in preparation for a 13th Century tune used by the Bohemian Brethren in the 16th Century. The psalm setting is hauntingly beautiful. I simply couldn’t wait to sing along. Remember that included sheet music?
The recording is at once recognizable as a liturgical service of Vespers… may be able to include some pared-down portions of the music for a congregational service of Vespers. The music is full of life, joy, and celebration appropriate for a New Year’s Eve service, a congregational anniversary, a building dedication, or an ordination.
Piffaro is blessed with skilled musicians, a creative composer in Kile Smith, and a daring record label, Navona Records. The combination produced a fresh, reverent, and timeless recording that is historically and musically grounded in the best of Christian liturgy and hymnody. What are they working on next?
The composition and recording of Vespers is inspired and inspiring.
This reviewer must know what it’s like to be a composer; he knows all about harmonic calamities! Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News writes:
What a beautiful and remarkable thing this turns out to be… altogether gorgeous and haunting. And when, out of some necessity of text and some version of harmonic calamity, a sudden dissonance arrives that out-Gesualdos Gesualdo, you remember that Kile Smith is a 21st century composer living in Philadelphia who has, almost like some Borgesian Pierre Menard (who wrote “Don Quixote” out of his own modern needs), synthesized all of this anew… a piece of contemporary music that, in its very different way, deserves to be mentioned along with Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.” The performance here is stunning. ★★★★
Just got the word—you can get the CD here. With the recording is a 24-page booklet with texts, translations, and notes on the composition, Piffaro, The Crossing, and Donald Nally. Also, this is an enhanced CD; load it into your computer to see the full score and photos of the recording sessions. It is a beautiful production all around.
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Abington crops up in the calendar here and previous years a good bit and that’s because it’s my church, Jackie is the Director of Music, and I volunteer, or am sometimes requested by same Director, to produce music for various services. I am happy when these opportunities arise, as they afford me twin advantages. They provide me with useful labor (one of the grand, unheralded purposes of life), and they provide me with useful education.
There is no school quite like the Thursday night choir rehearsal with 12 or 15 singers who, in spite of having many duties and cares with which to occupy their lives, nevertheless show up week after week to prepare music for the upcoming services. They carry with their various and wide-ranging musical abilities a willingness to perform correctly what is put before them. And they each carry one more item to every rehearsal: an hourglass, through which pour the sands of patience. Some hourglasses are small, some large, and each has a different rate of flow. But they each carry one, and the composer can only hope that if the top empties out, they are in the mood to turn it over.
This is the school that will reveal to you—more quickly and more efficiently than any other—the distance between your actual and your imagined compositional prowess.
We are hosting a brief service Wednesday, January 21st at 7 pm, an ecumenical Vespers in honor of the Year of St. Paul, with a Roman Catholic church from just down the road, Our Lady Help of Christians. After the Vespers will be an airing of the ongoing Lutheran and Catholic dialogue on justification. And after figuring that out, we’ll serve coffee (we are Lutheran, after all) and refreshments.
I’ve written a Magnificat for the Vespers, and again, church music confronts me with the task of composing something that must be grasped, not only in a small portion of one rehearsal by a choir, but immediately, in church, by the congregation. For this to be successful, as much as a composer can calculate success, the effect has to be almost instantaneous and worthwhile, as much as anyone can calculate worth.
Other than the Music Director, the responsibility for bringing this off rests on not one person who performs music for a living. Oh, there are a few singers in the choir who have training (from whence arises the sanguine descant), but everyone has chosen another line of work. The Cantor part will be taken by two girls, 11 and 13. I have been taken to school over and over again in these situations and (usually) enjoy the education. And you might not think so, but I can tell you it’s exciting, watching all those hourglasses.
Here’s a MIDI version, and the score. Took some doing to get it all on one page. Yes, I know about, and am quite fond of, the (double) direct fifths. Mind the repeats!
Michael Lawrence has posted some nice words, some awfully nice words, about Vespers at The New Liturgical Movement. It meant a lot to me when, referring to my setting of “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” he said, “This is a tune that had gone sour for me—until I heard this performance.” I’ll have to ask him sometime what went sour and what could possibly have changed his mind from what I’ve done, but in the meantime I’m tickled as can be that some folks are enjoying the snippets from the premiere on YouTube; there are a few out there but I think this is the one Michael watched.
People commented on Michael’s post. I wrote this, which is also an update on the CD:
“I can’t say enough about Piffaro, The Crossing, and Donald Nally, all of whom brought this about. It’s a (quite remarkable, as I think about it) collaboration between two giants in their respective fields, an early-music instrumental group, and a new-music choir. We indeed recorded this in late July, which gave me a chance to do a little rewriting after the January 2008 premiere. We’re editing the recording now, and we expect an early 2009 release on Parma Recordings. This Vespers is my attempt to write a piece filled with the spirit of Renaissance-era German church music; it includes chorales and chant, and is played on the instruments of that time. My rewriting on this (especially on the Deo gratias), by the way, was itself inspired by my wife’s and my attendance at the glorious Colloquium in Chicago.”
And I’m not kidding about that last part; I wrote about it here. There were some middling changes I made throughout the Vespers after the premiere, but I did some major rewriting on “Psalm 27” and “Deo gratias,” and the Colloquium helped to re-plug me into some sacred electricity to finish those off. Don’t know exactly when the CD’s coming out, but it can’t be too soon for me.
David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Jim Cotter of WRTI’s Creatively Speaking put last week’s radio segment together with this film (just over 5 minutes). Great shots with some raw takes of Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, Deo gratias, etc.
