Synopsis:
An exploration of the Mass woven through Western European, African American and 21st Century traditions.

Inspiration: Why a liturgical setting to the recital?
I approached the recital situation with a sort of a phobia, or an allergic reaction to participating in a programming model in which I wasn’t fully engaged. Filling in a template with music that checks boxes and doesn’t articulate my own feelings and experience in an explicit way. I think this idea of explicit context is critical: in order to perform well, these things need to be in the front of your mind, for every single note.”

As a child, singing was all religious or liturgical and all in a choral setting with close family and friends. Everyone in my family participated in choir. Singing works like Beethoven’s Ode To Joy followed by Lauryn Hill’s arrangement of "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" is a reflection of my actual lived experience with liturgical music. It’s comprised of all of these things: early music, Bach, contemporary gospel, and also new music. When you put these seemingly different things together and acknowledge the connections between them, you have to acknowledge that there’s something shared among these composers. There’s something that is shared among all people. This recital is an opportunity for me to marry all of those flavors together and have that conversation in front of people.

In setting three familiar spirituals, Tyshawn Sorey’s task was to break the songs out of the aesthetic that we understand them within, so that the text and the ideas behind the text could become more apparent. I had this realization that many spirituals are essentially code for suicide notes. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, is someone begging God to kill them, to “carry me home.” The poet Langston Hughes, in his time, directly connected to the possibility of these spirituals being suicidal, and I really want to show audiences another side of these songs. I think a lot of times spirituals are misunderstood, heard as happy songs or praising the Lord. But these are songs created by people in extraordinary circumstances, and they’re amazing, metaphorical expressions of real faith.

The order of the mass I’m using here, and which Caroline Shaw has followed in her miniature mass, accords with my own understanding of a spiritual journey. I’m basically queering the mass. Queering in the broad sense of bending it to my own understanding. Beginning with the Kyrie, which begs for mercy, and then the Agnus Dei, which represents the possibility for change, but only through death. There’s the affirmation of the Credo and the exaltation of the Gloria, with Bach’s “Quia Fecit,” which is so full of ecstatic wonder and excitement. The Sanctus is a moment of meditation and then the Benedictus has this very simple text, “Where there is darkness, he will bring light.” That’s the entire recital right there: Present the darkness and show the change into light.

(Adapted from an interview with journalist Fergus McIntosh.) 

Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Kanye West and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Requiem Mass. The 2022-23 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera under the rubric Proximity.

In addition to the more than 200 church cantatas he wrote in his capacity as Leipzig’s municipal music director and cantor of the St. Thomas School, J.S. Bach composed or arranged dozens of oratorios, motets, chorales, and sacred songs. All were intended, as stipulated in his employment contract, to “incite the listeners to devotion.” He produced his first Leipzig cantata for the first Sunday after Trinity on May 30, 1723, barely two weeks after reporting for work. By the end of his first year in Leipzig, he had compiled a full liturgical cycle of some 60 cantatas, and by 1729 he had enough such works in the hopper to relax his frenetic pace and turn his attention to other kinds of music. The two solo arias on tonight’s program date from 1727: “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen” is from Cantata No. 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (Rest contented, beloved soul), “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from the St. Matthew Passion.

Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Kanye West and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Requiem Mass. The 2022-23 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera under the rubric Proximity.

The versatile composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey began his career as a jazz drummer and trombonist, performing and recording with the likes of Vijay Iyer, Anthony Braxton, and John Zorn. At age 39, his interest in experimental music in the classical tradition prompted him to take up graduate studies in composition, first at Wesleyan and then at Columbia. “My very being is dissonance,” he told an interviewer by way of explaining his attraction to European modernism. That dissonance manifests not only in Sorey’s musical language but also in his identity as an African-American artist in the era of Black Lives Matter. Much of his recent vocal music focuses on issues relating to race in America, including the song cycle Cycles of My Being (presented by Shriver Hall Concert Series in February 2019) and the monodrama Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a tribute to Jazz Age superstar Josephine Baker. Sorey’s commitment to improvisation is reflected in his fluid approach to composition. “There’s no definitive version of a piece,” he says. “I try to let it live its own life, whether that be through expansion or contraction. In the end, I want the piece to grow, just like I’m trying to grow.”

One of the few African-American women composers to have achieved national recognition, Margaret Bonds grew up on the segregated South Side of Chicago and attended nearby Northwestern University. A pupil of Florence Price, another pathbreaking Black composer, she cultivated a long and fruitful partnership with the poet Langston Hughes. Like Price, Bonds suffered from the dual impact of sexism and racism, and much of her music was only “discovered” after her death. In 1933, the same year the Chicago Symphony premiered Price’s First Symphony, Bonds became the first Black soloist of either sex to appear with the orchestra, playing a piano concerto by John Alden Carpenter. In that same year she wrote the song “To a Brown Girl Dead,” to a poem by Countee Cullen. Bonds continued to compose, perform, and teach after moving to New York City in 1939, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, where she became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement. She died in California in 1972, shortly after the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered her Credo for chorus and orchestra.

The versatile composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey began his career as a jazz drummer and trombonist, performing and recording with the likes of Vijay Iyer, Anthony Braxton, and John Zorn. At age 39, his interest in experimental music in the classical tradition prompted him to take up graduate studies in composition, first at Wesleyan and then at Columbia. “My very being is dissonance,” he told an interviewer by way of explaining his attraction to European modernism. That dissonance manifests not only in Sorey’s musical language but also in his identity as an African-American artist in the era of Black Lives Matter. Much of his recent vocal music focuses on issues relating to race in America, including the song cycle Cycles of My Being (presented by Shriver Hall Concert Series in February 2019) and the monodrama Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a tribute to Jazz Age superstar Josephine Baker. Sorey’s commitment to improvisation is reflected in his fluid approach to composition. “There’s no definitive version of a piece,” he says. “I try to let it live its own life, whether that be through expansion or contraction. In the end, I want the piece to grow, just like I’m trying to grow.”

Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Kanye West and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Requiem Mass. The 2022-23 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera under the rubric Proximity.

In addition to the more than 200 church cantatas he wrote in his capacity as Leipzig’s municipal music director and cantor of the St. Thomas School, J.S. Bach composed or arranged dozens of oratorios, motets, chorales, and sacred songs. All were intended, as stipulated in his employment contract, to “incite the listeners to devotion.” He produced his first Leipzig cantata for the first Sunday after Trinity on May 30, 1723, barely two weeks after reporting for work. By the end of his first year in Leipzig, he had compiled a full liturgical cycle of some 60 cantatas, and by 1729 he had enough such works in the hopper to relax his frenetic pace and turn his attention to other kinds of music. The two solo arias on tonight’s program date from 1727: “Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen” is from Cantata No. 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (Rest contented, beloved soul), “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from the St. Matthew Passion.

Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Kanye West and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Requiem Mass. The 2022-23 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera under the rubric Proximity.

Classically trained at Oberlin and Juilliard, Moses Hogan began his career as a pianist before finding his lifelong niche as a conductor and arranger of choral music. His passion was the African-American spirituals that he heard and sang as a child in his native New Orleans, where his uncle was minister of music in the historic New Zion Baptist Church. (In 1957, the year he was born, the church hosted the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the leadership of the young Martin Luther King, Jr.) Before his premature death of brain cancer in 2003, Hogan arranged nearly 90 spirituals and performed them with a series of choral groups he directed. In his editor’s preface to The Oxford Book of Spirituals, he writes movingly about the “intertwined strands of sorrow and hope” that course throughout the songs of enslaved people and their descendants.

Caroline Shaw rocketed to fame in 2013 when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her Partita for Eight Voices, which the jury described as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” The multitalented American composer, singer, and violinist has made something of a specialty of boundary crossing and genre bending. Equally at home in classical and pop music, Shaw has written works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati symphonies, collaborated with rapper Kanye West and Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, and performed with groups ranging from the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth to the early music ensemble Tenet. Shaw’s vocal music draws on an equally eclectic assortment of texts, from Claudia Rankine and Billy Joel to the Requiem Mass. The 2022-23 season marks her first foray into opera with Four Portraits, one of three short operas on contemporary themes commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera under the rubric Proximity.

Julius Eastman was an artist who, as a gay, Black man, aspired to live those roles to the fullest. He occupies a special niche in the annals of musical minimalism, the repetitive, less-is-more idiom associated with composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley that flourished in the late 20th century. Eastman himself preferred the term “organic music”—music governed by autonomous internal processes rather than a predetermined compositional plan. Although he was classically trained at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, his refusal to play by the rules and his openness to pop and other influences made him a natural ally of avant-garde rebels like composers John Cage and Meredith Monk and cellist Arthur Russell. But his exceptional musicianship also commanded the respect of Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss, and other mainstream modernists. Despite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died homeless and alone. Recent years have seen a renaissance of pieces like Crazy Nigger, Femenine, and The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc for ten cellos, with its Prelude for solo baritone.

Dutch composer Igee Dieudonné (who goes by the name Ortolan in his work as a music producer) takes “a multidimensional, multifaceted approach to sound and structure within the idea of traditional songwriting.” A case in point is “VIGIL,” a prayerful song that grew out of a “spontaneous collaboration” with baritone Davóne Tines. “It was originally created by me and Igee in an improv session,” Tines explains. “And very uncommonly, the song came out fully formed in one try. It blends our various sensibilities including gospel, contemporary classical, French impressionism, and experimental pop. I describe the feeling of the sound world as a Monet watercolor with some added soul.” Both “VIGIL” and the five-minute video of the same name in which Tines can be seen singing it (subtitled “An Exercise in Empathy”) honor the memory of Breonna Taylor, the young African-American medical worker who was tragically shot and killed by Louisville police officers in 2020.