Composer Maurice Duruflé
When we first programmed Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem for May 2020, our intention was to venture back into historical music to be reminded of how we’ve arrived here, today. Certainly, there are few works that represent the foundations upon which contemporary music rests than this Requiem, which employs ancient plainsong as the building block to every aspect of the work. Even when the chorus is not singing the venerable, indestructible chants of the Mass for the Dead, the orchestra takes up the tunes and expands their meaning through counterpoint and harmony. The work references over a millennium of evolving European music, but it doesn’t strike the ear as historical or musicological; it is an organic, nuanced attempt to capture the melancholy, fear, and hope that accompany our response to death – the response of “those left behind.”
Composer Christopher Cerrone.
Typical of how my brain works, stuck in the present, I couldn’t help but imagine a new companion piece to Duruflé’s rumination on death and eternity. So, we invited Chris Cerrone (whose brilliant The Branch Will Not Break was the last work BCE sang prior to the pandemic shutdown) to compose a piece for Duruflé’s orchestral forces. Chris was inspired by a Tumblr page he found called “the last message received,” a collection of short submissions offering tiny glimpses into the lives of others – a now unsurprising practice in our social-media-saturated world. Each “last message” represents a unique, complex moment in a life: a relationship breakup, a professional parting of ways, an unexpected death, suicide. The beauty of the concept is that we do not know who or where the authors are. We cannot help but conjure an image of them, based on their words; we wonder about their stories. Chris invites a connection to these stories through his primarily minimal music, making space for us to embody the words as if our own. His stark, disciplined musical language allows us to hear ourselves say or think these words, to understand them, and to recognize their stories in ourselves. But that austere sound world gives way in the end to a disarmingly familiar chord progression: a place we’ve all been, many times, singing equally familiar words we recognize as sometimes difficult to say, sometimes left unsaid, always welcome: “thank you.”
In our concert, those thank-yous serve as the portal to the Requiem. Requiems are intended to be specific – to memorialize, bless, and commit a person who is no longer with us. Yet, it’s unclear for whom we sing this Requiem today. Is it for the authors of the final messages just heard? For those lost to the pandemic? For those gone early in unnatural, unnecessary deaths in Ukraine, or before them in Syria, Afghanistan, Charleston, Orlando? Or is it a Requiem to civility, unity, and common causes?
Perhaps the answer lies in the words of the final movements.
May the angels sing you into paradise…
receive you and with Lazarus,
once a poor man,
may you have eternal rest.
10/27/2019 performance by the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra, Bienen Contemporary/Early Vocal Ensemble, University Chorale, and the Northwestern Alumni Choir, directed by Victor Yampolsky (chorus master: Donald Nally), in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall.
Let’s face it: we are human. And humans hold hope. If there is not a heaven, then we at least have song, here, from whence we project our voices into the unimaginably ancient heavens, with hope. And, if there is a heaven, then perhaps the friends and relatives who have gone before us are right now welcoming new community members from Ukraine, embracing them, and joining them in singing songs at such great volume as to be equally unimaginable as the vastness of the heavens themselves. Singing songs of despair. Singing songs of hope.
