| | WCPE gave me a startling morning today. I usually listen to their Sunday morning Great Sacred Music program on the way to church. It's an hour-long drive from Campbell to west Raleigh, so I have a lot of listening time. Occasionally they broadcast mediocre choral music that all sounds the same, but most of the time they play good stuff. Last Sunday I listened to almost the entirety of Bach's Mass in b minor. That was a treat. 
This morning I turned up the volume when I noticed a strain of shimmery, Frenchy sounds, and thought it might be Faure. It definitely wasn't. When I listened closer, I realized the text was German. It also became increasingly grandiose and bombastic. I couldn't place the composer, but it sounded suspiciously Wagnerian, and suspiciously not sacred. There was nothing reverent or worshipful, and emphatically nothing humble in the style or orchestration.
But I wasn't prepared for what it actually was. The announcer gave the composer: Frederic Delius. The title: "Celebration of the Will to Say Yes to Life." And the text? It was from Nietzsche.
And then, while I was trying to digest that one, the next piece was announced: the akathist of thanksgiving by Grigory Petrov, an Orthodox priest who died in a Siberian prison camp in the early twentieth century. He wrote the words; the poem was set to music by later composer whose name I didn't catch. I heard most of it before I got to church. There couldn't possibly have been a bigger contrast to the Delius composition. The style was austere and polyphonic, and the words, which were sung in English, were an outpouring of praise and thanksgiving to Christ.
What really stunned me was how clearly the music of each piece reflected the meaning of the text, even when I couldn't understand the words. Music isn't neutral.
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| | Posted 1/28/2007 10:44 PM - 1 view - 3 comments
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