Sequences

Welcome to the world of secret codes and hidden meaning.  

Corrado Margutti’s Missa Lorca is a messy Romantic affair of significant proportions, burgeoning with mysterious metaphors and abstract allegories, complete with a symbolic clash between Good and Evil.  A Monteverdi mass is brandished, Excalibur-like, at any and all signs of Those Who Would Lay Siege to The Kingdom (aka the denizens of Lorca’s world). 

Moved by such an extraordinary work, we wrote Margutti to ask How?   He answered with a two-page email.   Fistfuls of “!”-darts conveyed the personal belief in Music as Rhetoric (a true-blue Monteverdi disciple!) alongside a deep-seated faith in God and Man as a mirror of.  Many of his words seed the following paragraphs. 

Missa Lorca grew out of a request from the conductor of the Torino Vocal Ensemble.  Asked by Carlo Pavese to elaborate a part of Monteverdi’s Missa “In illo tempore” (1610) for a concert, Margutti decided to expand the Agnus Dei by composing a new work – Mundo (World).   Margutti loves Lorca.  (Can you tell?)  He decided to use Lorca’s poem Mundo in which the poet, before the beginning of the first verse, quotes:  Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.   (Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.)   

So it began.  What started as Mundo became the Agnus Dei movement of Missa Lorca, commissioned by Gary Graden for the St Jakob’s Chamber Choir, who premiered the work in 2006.  We are only the second choir to perform this heavenly Monteverdi Remix in its entirety, Missa Lorca receives its Italian debut this September. 

The Mass begins with Evening, “the hour for being sincere” (Lorca).  In Lorca, Margutti finds a “deep human meaning”, for him the most important thing in all parts of the Mass.  And so, Kyrie (2006) unfolds out of the depths of our human souls – anguish blossoming, pretense torn out petal by polyphonic petal until we stand naked, pleading for divine mercy.  The vocal sextet functions as in Agnus Dei (2002), as Guardians of The Key.  Performing the Monteverdi counterpart whole-note-for-note, they guide the anxious through the forest of foreign tonali-trees, tossing tonics and casting dominant-spells into winds stuffed with coloured seeds, so that the hunted can sing their way Home. 

The Gloria (2004) is something else.  A slingshot of deep blinding light proclaims the Devil’s arrival.  Like the Silver Surfer turned bad, he rides in on pounding waves of crackling materia, cool as h*ll.   Even his signature (# # # # # # #) is hot.   The Dude is vanquished by the materialization of God in the body of Christ, symbolized musically by motivic Monteverdian fragments that insinuate themselves into the Spanish text with belligerent insistence, dissipating the threat.  In the end the flute (Music!) breaks an angel of glass (Lucifer!).  Does Lorca talk about “music as a possibility to win against Evil”?  Margutti thinks so.

Credo (2006), the only movement without Latin text, is the vocal materialization of the people’s faith into Song.  Lorca did not believe in God but his poems speak of a deep and human sense of the divine.  In a letter to Manuel de Falla, Lorca attempts to explain his recreation of a traditional ballad: “ … a distant evocation, in which things are strangely transformed, in the manner of the Mass, which evokes the passion of Christ by means of his original words … it ought to be the plastic algebra of a drama of passion and pain.”  This suggests that Lorca thought of the Mass not as a structural paradigm, but as a way of rendering deep emotion, something that inspired Margutti to write (“with deep emotion”) Missa Lorca.

A prayer sung “before the dark”, Sanctus (2005) uses two poems of Lorca which mimic closely the Latin prayers:  holy holy holy hosanna.  “The man is blue!”, Lorca tells.  “Benedictus is blue, blue as the sky where birds open their wings before the night.”, Margutti writes.  Blue is also the colour of Dona nobis pacem (2006), where a tender rain, an azure kiss from the mother of rain – The Infinity, God – lulls us to sleep, in heavenly peace.

We all love Missa Lorca.  (Can you tell?)  We can’t wait to get to know D’amore e d’ombre, freshly written for us by Margutti; to be premiered in Tokyo next January, as part of our THREE-choir festival with the choirs of Ko and Jojo.

Heavily-laden yet, we turn to the nonsense syllables of Thomas Jennefelt’s minimalistic Villarosa sequences, of which we sing four.  The pseudo-Latin sounds and series title reference the chants (sequentia) sung during the rite of the Catholic Mass.  Deliver us from meaning. 

Music first, text later (or not at all).  Jennefelt does a Prima Prattica to Margutti-Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (the Word begats Music).  The jumbled mumble tumbles, rockin’ and rollin’ out of us in the Ultimate Sonic Experience.  Sound for Sound’s sake.  How indulgent, how carefree … how irresponsible?  How dare Jennefelt throw it back to us – active and armchair musicians – to decide what all this is about!  Teasing us with fricatives that release the fragrance of phonemes, with endless repetitions that cause us to meditate on a vowel’s soul, unraveling imaginary diphthongs.   Taunting us with paths that go nowhere or doors that open to Something Else.  The cheek of it!  Exposing music itself as a codified language of sounding symbols, of clues and cues.  It can mean Whatever.  You decide. 

Break the Code.