Summa This, Summa That
Taking things in a different direction once again — tacking away from yesterday’s Early (If Strange) Sacred Music — for something much more recent. Something even more unusual (despite the undeniable strangeness of Gesualdo). And something that is also, in a bit of a departure from my prior selections, much longer.
It’s the nearly-contemporary (1981, though not performed ’til 1987) Miserere of Henryk Górecki, a recent Polish composer best known for his searing Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (which is also superb Lenten music, come to think of it). You’ll have to crank it up and be patient, though, because the first 3 minutes are almost inaudible. The half-hour build-to-boil is definitely a “long game,” yes. And it’s a piece that appeals to me more as a whole than it does in sections. But the overall effect is very, very powerful. And definitely Lenten; profoundly so.
The instrumentation and structure are certainly atypical (as is the fact that Górecki deals with the question of tempo by indicating how it should take to perform):
Written for large (120 voices) a cappella mixed choir, a typical performance lasts 35 minutes. The text comprises five words: ‘Domine Deus Noster‘ (Lord our God), which are repeated for the first ten sections, resolved by a chorus of ‘Miserere nobis‘ (Lord have mercy on us) in the eleventh and final section. Both lines of the text are formed as simple but imploring pleas.
Attribution(s): “Polish Composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki Polish composer” by Lech Kowalski & Włodzimierz Pniewski was scanned from the Polish monthly “Studio” (Nov/Dec 1993, page 8) and licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons; “Bells” via Shutterstock.
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