Whenever I start a new piece, I listen to a LOT of music.
Sometimes I drown my ears in the music of baroque composers like Bach and
Handel, sometimes in folk-inspired artists like Mumford & Sons or Joan Baez
– I’ll listen to anything that strikes my fancy as a source of inspiration.
Ultimately, I start to hone my listening list down to pieces that have similar
forces and scope as the piece I’m about to compose. As I brainstormed about the
type of music to compose for Terra Nostra,
I went big. Terra Nostra is my 65-minute
oratorio for adult and children’s choirs, four soloists, and orchestra, so I
studied works that were comparable in some manner to my project. Here are the
top five inspirations that I studied throughout the composing of my oratorio:
1. Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth – cover recorded by Martin Gore (originally composed by the rock band Sparks)
Okay, this song is the opposite of an oratorio with only a duration
of three minutes and the performing forces consisting of a singer and his band.
But this little golden nugget is what got me thinking about writing a piece
about our planet in the first place. In 2008, I was commissioned to write a new
string quartet. During my brainstorming phase for the quartet, I coincidentally
happened to be listening to Gore’s rendition of the song while watching an
intense thunderstorm outside my window. Gore’s hauntingly beautiful voice,
along with the song’s lyrics and raging storm, gave me the distinct impression
that I was listening to a cautionary tale about the dangers of not paying
attention to our planet. I wrote the string quartet about Gaia (the Greek
personification of the planet) but felt my work on the subject wasn’t done.
When the San Francisco Choral Society asked what I’d like to write an oratorio
about, I knew exactly what the topic would be.
2. Elijah – Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn
This is the first oratorio I ever sang when as an undergraduate
student, and it has remained a personal favorite. Written for four soloists,
chorus, and orchestra, it times out around two and a quarter hours. Yet it
never feels that long to me - how easily the music flows from one section to
another! Mendelssohn masterfully controlled the pacing of his story of the
prophet Elijah so that it just flies by. There is a particularly well-paced sequence
in which Elijah repeatedly instructs the prophets of Baal to have their god prove
his existence; as the prophets get more desperate to summon their god, so does
the music until it reaches a feverish pitch that is only answered by silence. Mendelssohn tempers these
wonderful moments of high drama with several sweet songs (Lift Thine Eyes, for instance); he is
also mindful to employ a four-chord motif repeatedly throughout the entire
oratorio that draws everything together.
3. Mass – Leonard Bernstein
At some point during my early graduate days, I encountered an LP
of Bernstein’s Mass at a garage sale.
When I brought it home and put it on the record player, I was stunned by what I
heard. What is this melting pot of musical styles (rock, jazz, blues, folks,
gospel, contemporary classical, etc.) folded around the story of a Celebrant who
is trying to lead an unruly congregation through a traditional Roman Catholic Mass
service that goes horribly awry? How had I never heard of this piece before??
This two-hour, semi-staged theatrical work for soloists, adult and boy choirs, dancers,
pit orchestra, and onstage instrumentalists was commissioned by Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971. Bernstein had a
thing for treading on fine lines that others might leave untouched (just look
at Candide), but I had never seen
anyone take it to this extreme. As the Celebrant keeps leading the Mass service,
the congregants get more and more rowdy. The piece comes to a powerful peak
when the Celebrant finally breaks down and smashes the altar. What follows next
is an incredible fourteen-minute musical monologue that revisits many of the piece’s
musical themes. In a particularly poignant moment of the monologue, the
Celebrant segues from the word “Adonai” (Hebrew for God) into “I don’t know.”
While this isn’t Bernstein’s finest work, his handling of the structure of the Mass,
along with the pacing of its destruction, is very well done. He also repurposes
material from the opening song (“A Simple Song”) at the very end (“Secret Songs”),
which effectively bookend the piece.
4. Carmina Burana – Carl Orff
It is hard to beat “O Fortuna” when one is looking at how to craft
raw, pounding energy. Orff scored the piece for large forces – three soloists, choir,
and a big orchestra – which made this entire piece essential listening. In addition
to studying “O Fortuna,” which Orff used as the both the first and final
movements, there are a number of more delicate movements throughout this hour
long piece that explore a good deal of orchestration and color.
5. Dona Nobis Pacem – Ralph Vaughan Williams
I originally began listening to Dona Nobis Pacem because the premiere of the first section of my
oratorio was paired up with this work on the San Francisco Choral Society’s
concert. But the more I delved into the piece, the more I fell in love with it.
Scored for soprano and baritone soloists, choir, and orchestra, this approximately
35 minute piece is Vaughan Williams’ emotional response to war. Vaughan
Williams created his libretto from excerpts of the Roman Catholic Mass, Bible,
and poetic works of Walt Whitman and John Bright. Since I was compiling my own
libretto for Terra Nostra, I was very
interested in what texts he selected to create an overarching narrative. Another interesting aspect
of the piece involves the soprano – she only sings the Latin texts that frame
the opening and closing of the cantata, as well as at a climactic moment in the
piece. I didn’t end up using the idea of a singular role for a soloist in my
oratorio, but will consider it in future compositions.
Ultimately, I studied a wide array of musical elements in these
works: the overall dramatic story, the pacing of the music, the lengths of
instrumental interludes, and how the soloists, choir, and orchestra forces were
balanced with each other. These five works, along with several others, helped
me to make decisions on how to structure and shape Terra Nostra into its final form.
