Divine dissonances
There’s a genre of new music that’s loved and sung by millions, making sounds that are both searingly contemporary but resonantly timeless. It’s music whose power has been undimmed and even amplified in the months and years of lockdown. I’m talking about contemporary choral music, composed by musicians like
Eric Whitacre and Cecilia Mcdowall, Morten Lauridsen and Judith Bingham. Why is their writing for voices so phenomenally popular, and why does it bring so many audiences to raptures, all in pieces that o en last no more than a few minutes?
I think it’s because they make us love dissonance in a way that generations of composers in the 20th century have tried to do; and because they are using techniques that are centuries old in order to create a soundworld that instantly communicates a timetranscending power.
And here’s how they do it – my words will now attempt to conjure the sounds of two of the greatest hits of the choral music of recent decades to prove the point: Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium and Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque. When you next listen to O Magnum Mysterium, you’ll relish how the music’s most moving moments are made when the music sits on a chord that Palestrina or Bruckner or any composer of previous centuries would have to resolve more conventionally, and more quickly. Freed from those expectations, Lauridsen can allow his singers to sit on those tingle-inducing
Whitacre’s complex chords are the places that give us the most pleasure as listeners
chords for an exquisitely extended few seconds, as the singers ponder the Great Mystery of Jesus’s incarnation.
Whitacre does something similar: the ‘golden light’ of Lux Aurumque is made from a halo of complex yet cuddly chords. He sets up a series of sighs, from simple chordal consonances to voluptuous dissonances. That’s an inversion of the way that harmony is supposed to work, because the complex chords are the places that give us the most pleasure as listeners, while the consonances pale by comparison: fewer notes, less complexity, less emotion. These emotion-generating dissonances are made by the voices singing notes that are close together, as if they want to reach out and touch one one another, rather than leaving gaps between them as the conventions of tonal harmony usually dictate.
In that sense, the true emancipators of the dissonance aren’t Schoenberg or Stockhausen – but Whitacre and Lauridsen. The power they release has brought choirs of tens of thousands from hundreds of countries together online during lockdown. Getting close to one another through our voices – these contemporary choral composers are creating resonant bridges of emotion through sound. Now that choirs can meet once again, their music will gild a Christmas season that will be uniquely moving: O Great Mystery, indeed.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening
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Born 1944 Pianist
The Brazilian pianist was one of classical music’s deep thinkers, with a reflective style that won countless enthusiasts throughout his long career. Nelson Freire started young, being just five years old when he first performed in public in his home town of Boa Esperança in south-east Brazil. He had started lessons aged three and went on to study with Lucia Branco, who could trace her own mentorship back to Liszt. Such auspicious connections served him well, with a teenage (13) win at Rio’s International Piano Competition that led to him being able to continue his studies in Vienna with Bruno Seidlhofer. Winning the Dinu Lipatti Medal a few years later helped to kick start his presence on the international concert scene, during which time he began to work with the world’s greatest orchestras, and forge an indomitable partnership (and long friendship) with fellow pianist Martha Argerich. Freire leaves a rich recorded legacy, including numerous discs with Argerich, plus some especially memorable performances of Romantic repertoire.
Nelson Freire