CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC: In which I ramble about three adaptations of, respectively, “The Little Match Girl”; Revelation; and the Gospel of Luke.

First, a disclaimer which is actually an apology: I know nothing about this kind of music whatsoever. I have no vocabulary for it. I will be throwing out random analogies and metaphors and people who actually know what they’re talking about here will probably laugh until they cry. On the other hand, that means that if you are also not well-versed in this kind of music (what is it even called? It comes up on iTunes as “classical” but that seems silly) maybe this post will give a sense of whether you might like these discs!

David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (and some other things). The difficulty with adapting this story, I think, is that when you’re reading it in the solitude of your skull it’s easy for the sublimity of the tale, the fever-dream intensity, to shiver into your consciousness. But music makes it somehow public and touchable in a way which my instinct says might emphasize the sentimentality which is also a real part of the story. I’m still not convinced that Lang works against the sentimentality enough (and there’s one very on-the-nose use of bells which I found distracting), but a second listen convinced me that there’s more cold rapture in this music than I’d thought at first.

Lang opens very strong, with a haunting chorus of overlapping voices calling, “Come, daughter,” chilly and doomy. Then he begins to alternate between clipped, precise storytelling (“It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the year”) and a sort of penitents’ chorus which offers aching soliloquies from the point of view of someone watching, or remembering watching, the little girl’s suffering. I still think that some of the girl’s visions and stations of the cross could be given a greater edge of hysteria, a greater sense of the music spiraling out of control. But overall this is a really memorable and poignant piece of music. I’d play it for kids who like Andersen as well as adults.

The other, short pieces on this disc (an adaptation of the Song of Songs, a Yiddish folk song, a riff on Genesis, and a sort of paraphrase of Ecclesiastes) didn’t move me, but might work better for you. I still felt like there was too much control here, too much deliberate, intellectual, maybe even self-consciously poignant pacing.

Phil Kline, John the Revelator. It’s wild to listen to this right after The Little Match Girl Passion, because the rhythm and emotion of the music is so different! We open with a terrific hymn or marching song–I really don’t think it’s just the “Glory, hallelujah!” chorus which put me in mind of Civil War songs–and from then on we alternate between relatively straightforward adaptations of the Mass in Latin, and deeply shaken, crisis-and-rapture songs in English. I loved “Alone” and “The Unnamable,” and also the take on “What Wondrous Love Is This?” which closes the disc. This is a fierce, tough piece of work which offers its broken heart up on a platter.

Krzyzstof Penderecki, St. Luke Passion. This one might be the hardest for me to talk about, in part because the parts which strike me and how they strike me keep changing. (I’ve listened to it three times in the past two days.) One thing I really love is how it captures so intensely three of the sharply-contrasting moods of an actual Palm Sunday or Holy Week Mass: the matter-of-fact statements of what went down; the scuttling, hissing chatter of the crowd, who can only agree and come together when they’re baying for Christ’s blood; and the agony and isolation of Christ.

The first time I listened to this, I remember thinking somewhere around maybe “Deus meus” that Penderecki really does convey the hysteria, alienation, the horror of the Passion narrative. “This music sounds the way Carnival of Souls looks,” I remember thinking. I haven’t had quite that reaction the other two times, but each time I’ve found something else which worked. The pacing really helps here, as you’re taken very naturally from one of the three moods to another, never quite allowed to settle in and get comfortable with any one way of relating to the music and story. And the setting of “Into your hands I commend my spirit” shakes me every time.

…And now, having exhausted the possibilities of the present, I’m listening to the Essential Tallis Scholars, which I cannot recommend highly enough!