Five links - the first two beautiful, the second two amusing:
- Joy Howard at The Crooked Line on a sublime performance of a Schein motet at Emmanuel Church.
- The Dalai Lama on what he learned from Thomas Merton.
- via Arts Journal, Creature Comforts on “what is Art?”
-via a Penn colleague, an inimitable performance by Nicolas Slonimsky
-and the last, both sublime and ridiculous; again, via Arts Journal
I am back from Boston where I attended performances of my Spiraling Ecstatically at Emmanuel Church. I wrote about this in previous posts here and here. For now, I want to thank the superb choir of Emmanuel Music, with its new Music Director, Ryan Turner, who conducted my motet; John Harbison, acting Music Director, and Pat Krol, Executive Director of Emmanuel Music, both of whom made so many things possible; and the community that is Emmanuel Church, for their kind interest in my work. Warm congratulations to Rev. Pamela Werntz, the newly instituted Rector at Emmanuel. She presided and preached at the morning prayer service yesterday, breaking open the Word in a deeply nourishing way. (Go here and click on sermons to read examples of her work.) Emmanuel is in good hands. I’m grateful for the presence of this community in my life.
Update: Read more about the events of the day in the Boston Musical Intelligencer review. Update #2: Pamela Werntz’s wife Joy blogged about the celebration here.
The Boston Musical Intelligencer has a pair of interviews with John Harbison - in his capacity as acting music director at Emmanuel Church - and the Rev. Pamela Werntz, who is to be installed as the new rector at Emmanuel this Sunday. As I wrote about earlier, my motet Spiraling Ecstatically will be done at both the morning prayer service and the installation service/Eucharist in the afternoon. Spiraling sets a poem of E. E. Cummings, and is a revision of a piece I wrote for the choir of the Catholic Campus Ministry during my student days in the Columbia University doctoral composition program.
Emmanuel Music will sing my Cummings motet, Spiralling Ecstatically this coming Sunday, March 7. The piece will be heard at a 10:00 Morning Prayer service at Emmanuel Church on Newbury St. in Boston, as well as at the 3:00 installation service for Emmanuel’s new rector, Rev. Pamela L. Werntz. The afternoon service will include the celebration of the Eucharist. Bach cantata #163, Nur jedem das Seine!, will also be heard at the morning service. If you don’t know about Emmanuel, this is a place where a Bach cantata is heard every week in its proper liturgical context, a practice begun under the leadership of the late conductor Craig Smith that has continued now for decades. (It is Craig who conducts Emmanuel on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s sublime CD of Bach solo cantatas.) Emmanuel is a lively and welcoming worshipping community that has an unusual commitment to the highest musical standards. I am very happy to be, in a small way, a part of that community through the motets I have written for Emmanuel over the years. You can hear one of those motets here (scroll down to “choral”), and see a sample of a score for that piece here. I will be there for both services, and also for the BMOP concert on Saturday night - Ball, Wheeler, Hartke, Babbitt, Olivero, Bartók. (At left: the “Pilgrim’s Progress” window at Emmanuel Church.)
