Chanticleer performs the premiere of “And on Earth, Peace,” in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday. Performances on the West Coast follow. A recording will be released by Warner Classics next month, though it will be available at the premiere.
FOR centuries and across cultures, music has maintained a close but fraught connection with religious beliefs and practices. Should liturgical music be performed outside the service? Should secular idioms be a part of the service? Which sound structures will bring listeners closer to God, and which rhythms and harmonies might risk tempting believers away from him? Does it matter whether sacred musical texts are comprehensible to performers or listeners? And a question that comes increasingly into play nowadays: What does it mean to perform, much less compose, in the musical traditions of a faith you do not follow?
Chanticleer, the San Francisco-based choir, has commissioned a new Mass, “And on Earth, Peace,” whose very conception raises these and other questions about music and religion. Joseph Jennings, the music director of Chanticleer, a 12-man a cappella chorus, asked five composers each to set one of the five standard sections of the Roman Catholic Mass: Kyrie, Credo, Sanctus, Gloria and Agnus Dei.
Multicomposer Masses are nothing new; when polyphonic Masses began to supplant Gregorian chant settings in the Middle Ages, most of them combined sections by different composers. Even the use of secular songs and texts in Mass settings dates back hundreds of years.
But with “And on Earth, Peace,” Mr. Jennings has gone beyond merely using nonreligious elements: he has invited each composer to reinterpret the Catholic Mass according to his or her personal spiritual beliefs. The resulting work, with the five sections connected by plainchant and motets, retains a bit of Latin but also incorporates Jewish texts, Sufi lyrics, a solemn Gaelic song and a section of Greek Orthodox liturgy.
“It’s an experiment,” Mr. Jennings said. “When we asked them to do this, we didn’t know how the different parts would fit together.”
The first task was to match composers with sections. For the English composer Ivan Moody, who is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and holds a diploma in Orthodox theology, the decision was easy. He wanted the Sanctus.
“I wanted to set a text that was common to Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and the Sanctus is exactly the same in the Latin and in the Greek liturgy with the exception of one word,” Mr. Moody said. The one word he refers to is no small detail to believers: it is “filioque,” Latin for “and from the son.” This clause represents the fundamental doctrinal difference between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, the question of whether the holy spirit proceeds from God alone or also from Christ.
“When I set this text, I believed what I was writing,” Mr. Moody said. “I couldn’t set a text in which I didn’t believe.”
Equally resolute about not compromising her beliefs was the Israeli-born composer Shulamit Ran. When Mr. Jennings asked her to contribute, she said she could do so only if she were free to compose “from a Jewish perspective.” Mr. Jennings encouraged her along those lines, but there was a problem: By the time Ms. Ran had agreed to participate, four of the five sections had been claimed by other composers. The only one left — the one nobody else wanted — was the Credo, the central article of the Catholic faith. Among other declarations, it states: “I believe in one holy, Catholic and Apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. And I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
The project of finding universal themes among religions might more easily be applied to a section like the Agnus Dei, which asks the lamb of God (Christ) for mercy and peace. “We had more than one taker for the Agnus Dei,” Mr. Jennings said. “But I told Shulamit that the Credo can be a movement about belief. The idea of believing in one God is not foreign to Judaism.”
Though uneasy about the task at first, Ms. Ran agreed to do it. “I also felt very honored,” she said, “because the Credo is the heart and soul of the Mass.”
In place of the Latin text, Ms. Ran used lines from Maimonides’ 13 principles of the Jewish faith, specifically “Ani Ma’amin,” Hebrew for “I believe.”
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“But I wanted to go beyond a declaration of principles,” Ms. Ran said. “I wanted to delve into the meaning of faith, to ask myself: ‘What does it mean to say, I believe in God? And what are the challenges of faith in the face of extreme adversity?’ ”
To that end, she included texts related to the Holocaust and to 9/11 along with Hebrew prayers like “Shema Yisrael” (“Hear, O Israel”), a central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.
For the composer Kamran Ince, who agreed to set the Gloria, the challenge was less about preserving the specificity of his own religious beliefs than about figuring out what those beliefs were. Born in Glendive, Mont., but raised mostly in Turkey by Turkish and American parents, Mr. Ince said that much of his work had reflected “spiritual and searching qualities, looking for something but not really being able to grab it.”
He approached the Gloria accordingly, setting a poem by Rumi (as translated by Nader Khalili). In contrast to the Latin text, which begins “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth,” the poem depicts uncertainty:
Look at these people.
Not knowing their feet from head
as they begin to arrive.
Every soul is seeking His soul.
Every soul parched with thirst
they’ve all heard the voice
of the quencher of thirst.
Mr. Ince, who says he does not subscribe to any religion but believes in a higher power, did not feel uncomfortable, as a non-Catholic, working in the Mass form. “The rituals of organized religion have always been very attractive to me,” he said. “And sometimes I think, ‘Wow, I wish I was a part of that and believed in that.’ I can feel this about many different religions.”
For Western choral singers, performing religious texts regardless of personal belief has become routine. This habit risks desanctifying religious music as much as it celebrates it, but Mr. Jennings says that Chanticleer always discusses the theology behind the music it performs. “I approach singing religious music,” he added, “from the idea that whether or not you believe, you must start from the perspective of people who do believe and realize that people build their lives around this belief.”
As for himself, Mr. Jennings is not Catholic. “But I’m a believer,” he said. “I pick up the parts that make sense to me.” Over the years he has composed and arranged a rich repertory of gospel songs for Chanticleer and other ensembles.
“I think it’s hard to sing this music and not believe in something,” he said, “some central power, even if you only believe in art itself and the whole act of creativity. That’s something very profound that defies explanation in words.”
The matter of transmitting a sense of belief through singing seems to be part of Chanticleer’s signature style. Anyone who has seen the group perform will recall beaming, almost beatified facial expressions along with the sensitive dynamics and intensely refined vocal blend. In an age in which irony seems the preferred mode of creative expression, the earnest eyes and wide smiles of Chanticleer’s singers can feel anachronistic. But to judge from its annual sold-out concerts in New York, as well as regular performances all over the country, this unabashed style of expression has many fans.
Mr. Jennings is careful to defend the distinction between sensitivity and sentimentality. “I think we need to nourish and cherish these tender spots,” he said. “Humanity needs a safe place where it can expose itself. Choral music is a great place to do that without it being exploited.”
According to recent studies by the National Endowment for the Arts and Chorus America, choral singing is the most popular creative art form in the country. More than 23 million adults perform regularly in a choir or chorus. Mr. Jennings said he believes that choral appreciation is on the rise. “If we had a day where everybody who sang in a choir showed up at a specific place and did a certain thing,” he said, “people would be very surprised to see how many people are involved in singing at some point in their lives.”
But for the composers of “And on Earth, Peace,” writing for Chanticleer was different from writing for an imaginary ensemble. “Chanticleer doesn’t sound like any other choir,” Mr. Moody said. “They’re absolutely unique, with an ethereal sound that is just amazing.”
The timbre of Chanticleer’s voices, he added, sounds to him, an Englishman, distinctly American. Mr. Jennings agrees. “In America we don’t have a school of choral singing the way the British do,” he said, “with men’s and boys’ choirs based in the cathedral, traditions passed down for generations. We take stuff from different countries, and our singers are from different backgrounds.”
For Ms. Ran, Chanticleer’s distinctive blend served as an assurance that the five-composer Mass would have a unity regardless of the structure or style of each composition. As of this writing, the composers had not heard their own work alongside the other sections. “But I have faith,” Ms. Ran said, “that if we all imagined writing for the same 12 magnificent voices and are thinking about the same issues of belief, and writing honestly, it will come together.”
That prediction is not far off. Mr. Moody’s Sanctus and the Agnus Dei set by Irish composer Michael McGlynn are redolent with echoes of centuries-old sacred idioms, while Mr. Ince’s and Ms. Ran’s sections, and the Kyrie by the American composer Douglas J. Cuomo (who also wrote the theme song for HBO’s “Sex and the City”) sound distinctly of this century. But a reverent spirit infuses the whole.
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