Shortly
before I began work on SONGS FROM
THE SKY, I happened to be in Venice,
a city famous for its liberal use of music in a liturgical context. I
recalled the early seventeenth-century practice of replacing standard
items of Vespers with musical motets, grafting them 'onto' the liturgy
and leaving additional verses to be delivered by the priest, sotto
voce. Following his own visit to St Mark's Basilica, in 1608, Thomas
Coryate described the music as 'so good that I would willingly goe an
hundred miles a foote at any time to heare the like'. Coryate's remarks
praise music alone. They diminish the significance of the liturgical
context in which the music was performed and usher forth a possible,
historical contention. It seems that, in early seventeenth-century
Venice, music made a serious claim for the foreground by challenging
its rank as an art at the service of something beyond itself.
SONGS FROM THE SKY makes a
comparative investigation into Aztec ritual
and Christian liturgical practice. It also refers to a phenomenon of
our own time, known as the Early Music movement. The work sets an Aztex
song-pom, 'Fish Song' ('Michcuicatl'), in Nahuatl, its original
language. 'Fish Song' is drawn from CANTARES
MEXICANOS, a volume that
dates from the late-sixteenth century and illuminates Aztex lore
in the light of the new Christian faith. For example, the Aztecs find
common ground between their own, symbolic use of the fish and New
Testament stories of Christ and the fishermen. In SONGS FROM THE SKY,
two narrators act as our guides during the first and last movements as
they refer to esotecric aspects of both heritages. They move around the
performance area, pause to speak at certain locations and in so doing,
inscribe a large, five-point pattern, or 'quicunx'. Similarly, the
spatial relationship between the five locations of the wind
instrumentalists delineates the same figure, which the Aztecs believed
was of such significance that it underpinned the world itself. The
narrators seem to be in control, but we are not entirely certain about
their identities. Perhaps one of the them is a contemporary historian
with an interest in Mexicana. Perhaps the other is from another age
altogether. Sometimes they tell us what is happening (e.g. when the
choir sings in Nahuatl) and sometimes they partake of the ritual itself
by reciting excerpts from teh Bible or CANTARES MEXICANOS. On another
level, it might also be said that they prevent us from directing our
ears towards the choir and make us wonder whether the music ought to be
treated as background - as a theatrical cyclorama.
An interesting this about churches, particularly those of Gothic
design, is the implied hierarchy of the seating as regards the
distances of individual people from the activities of the priest.
Notably, the social history of the concert has left us with a
comparable paradigm: market economics usually determine one's distance
from the source of the music. And so, in SONGS FROM THE SKY, the
narrators move through the central parting of the audience, as if they
were priests carrying the Word to the congregation, as physical object
and intangible sacrament, during a reading from the Holy Gospel. Thus,
the narrators dispatch literary excerpts to particular 'zones' of the
assembly. Indeed, depending on the location of one's seat, it may or
may not be possible to har everything they say.
In contrast, the two central movements promote aesthetic experiences of
a 'purer' kind. The narrators and instrumentalists exit at the end of
'Summoning the Muse' and so that aspect of visual, dyamic motion is
removed from the area of performance. This absence of motion assists,
as it were, in freezing our focus onto the music alone. Sound assmues a
theatricality of its own kind. In the second movement, 'The
Song-Flowers of Rain', the Aztecs tell us they are eager to be in
Paradise and wish to be caught in the 'net' of Christianity. In the
third, 'Now God has Music', they sing of the pleasure they derive from
knowing that God - at last - has genuine music in the form of highly
skilled, sung devitions brought to Mexico from the Old World.
Accordingly, this movement reworks eighteenth-century Mexican composer,
Manuel de Sumaya's Lamentations - a composition clearly influenced by
European contrapuntal technique - and thus invokes the spirit of the
Early Music movement, flavoured perhaps by the Venetian polychoral
tradition.
In the final movement ('And Mexico Endures'), the narrators and
instrumentalists return and the music oscillates between foreground and
background once again. It responds to the emotions of the Aztecs, which
fluctuate between rejoicing and weeping. Towards the end, the choir
assumes the role of commentator and delivers the final (Biblical)
excerpt of the work, which finishes with the phrase, 'and to dust you
shall return'. It echoes the conclusion of 'Fish Song' (spoken in
translation by the narrators), in which the Aztecs accept both the
difficulty of their lives and the promise of immortality. And so the
lines from Genesis remind us of the moratlity of the body and the
ephemeral nature of human achievement.
It is sometimes said that the Early Music movement tells us more about
ourselves than it does about the past. Insofar as it has shown that we
are interested in music as something that is context-specific, that
addresses a particular culture, at a particular time, I believe the
statement to be true. The concert format as a musical event, as it has
developed since the eighteenth century, has tended to suppress all
aspects that do not address the ear. Movement, in particular, has
become irrelevant. SONGS FROM THE SKY
is part of a larger project that
attempts to address the imbalance.
copyright © N.G.Brown 2007