Bryan’s ‘Requiem’ had to wait out the pandemic
Now streaming on CSOtv, it’s all the stronger for it
In a strange, cyclical way, the world is much the same as it was the last time Courtney Bryan was in Chicago.
In early 2020, the composer, 38, was living in Italy after receiving the prestigious Rome Prize, an honor previously bestowed upon musickers like Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. When COVID19 clobbered Europe, however, Bryan’s yearlong fellowship was cut short; she left directly from Rome into mostly normal rehearsals of her violin concerto “Syzygy” with the Chicago Sinfonietta and Jennifer Koh, save for washing her hands obsessively and distancing from orchestra members. Bryan expected to be back here just a couple weeks later, on March 23, for the live premiere of her “Requiem,” a Chicago Symphony commission featuring the vocal quartet Quince.
Of course, that wasn’t to be. Now, with the “Requiem” finally streaming until July 23 on CSOtv, the orchestra’s digital concert platform, its deferred premiere comes at a time when venues have reopened, the summer music season is (mostly) in full swing, and, for some, life has returned to “normal,” even as the virus and its variants rage outside the U.S.
But we aren’t the same. Nothing is the same. Even though Bryan doublebarred the “Requiem” in fall 2019, before the coronavirus’ deadly mass rampage, that theme of transformation underpins her elegiac work like a continuo. Bryan describes the piece as indebted to a greater tradition of requiem masses — those by composers like Mozart and Verdi, certainly, but also the Anglican masses she grew up with — with the philosophical thrust of non-Christian worldviews that embrace death as a life stage, rather than a solemn end. The foreword to the score cites inspirations as plural as neoshamanist death rituals and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but its influences are more philosophical than sonic.
“I was thinking about death rituals from different traditions than my own, while feeling careful about what it means to appropriate versus appreciate. For example, I didn’t want to directly take sounds out of those traditions, because that would be appropriation,” Bryan says. “Instead, I studied and was inspired by these ideas, while using text from the tradition that I practice. That’s why I use verses from the Bible that emphasize this idea of transformation — a cyclical view of life and death, rather than a fight or triumph against death.”
That’s apparent from the “Requiem’s” first of its five sections: a hair-raising, a cappella fantasy on the Ecclesiastes verse “All come from dust, and to dust all return.” The Quince singers enter humming; their words coalesce from the murmurs, then disappear again, ultimately evaporating into arid hisses.
Bryan had actually begun writing this section for Quince even before the CSO and Mead composer-in-residence Missy Mazzoli reached out to her about a commission. In 2016, Bryan met the ensemble at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute in New Hampshire. The five women gelled immediately.
“At that time, we’d just started a project commissioning songs about the Dust Bowl and American migration — whether that meant being displaced by government, weather, famine, or need,” says Liz Pearse, a soprano and Quince member. “We asked if Courtney would be interested in writing us something; she said yes, and in the original piece she wrote for us, she gravitated to the word ‘dust.’ ”
By sheer coincidence, Bryan was working on that piece when the CSO and Mazzoli came knocking with a commission that would share a MusicNOW program with — who else — Quince vocal ensemble. Bryan, meanwhile, was still “deeply affected” from the process of writing her 2016 work “Yet Unheard” for soprano, orchestra, and chorus, which she composed while processing Naperville native Sandra Bland’s death in a Texas jail cell. That piece, as well as her earlier “saved” for three gospel choirs, “Sanctum” for orchestra and recorded sound, and piano work “Spirit” — in which Bryan incants the names of Black Americans killed by police — spring from specific losses of life. But for the “Requiem,” Bryan wanted to try a different approach.
“I tend to go between types of projects: If I’m working on something super personal, I also like to do something more universal,” Bryan says. “It led to me wanting to do a piece that was thinking about life and death broadly.”
Bryan asked if she could incorporate “Dust to Dust” into a broader “Requiem.” Quince agreed, and Bryan began coalescing a larger work around the Biblical texts she’d selected. That, of course, meant writing material for CSO musicians. While orchestrating the “Requiem,” Bryan tapped a death ritual from her own backyard: New Orleans jazz funerals. Bryan — who was born in New Orleans and now lives there, teaching music at Tulane University — knew that the bands’ exuberantly melancholic soundcolor was exactly the one she sought for the “Requiem.” Even so, Bryan again tried to avoid pastiche or mimicry, instead invoking that tradition solely through the “Requiem’s” instrumentation: bass drum, tuba, trombone, trumpet, and keening clarinet.
“New Orleans jazz funerals really focus on a celebration of life, which isn’t something a lot of the masses I’ve read about (do.) It’s a different way of thinking about death,” Bryan says.
The rest of the “Requiem” unfolds so seamlessly that it’s hard to believe it was written in stages, with nothing to say of its viscerality after the losses of the last year. In the second movement, Quince intones the promise from 1 Corinthians that “we will all be changed” with such ardency that one can’t help but believe it; in the third, the CSO funeral band picks up its dirge while Pearse chants Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”) with skyward-climbing urgency. But, as Bryan herself notes, this is ultimately a Requiem about the transition from life to death, and there’s an in-betweenness to the proceedings that flouts convention. The work, for example, ends on a dominant seventh chord in its third inversion — a chord that lands on the ear as both transitional and precarious, like a pyramid made to balance on one of its points.
When asked whether she thinks her “Requiem” is a comforting one, Bryan pauses. “That’s a good question. We talked about the right time for this premiere, with the loss everyone has experienced. Quince had the idea of releasing ‘Dust to Dust’ (on YouTube, in June 2020), so that people could hear it during that time.
“I’m not sure if that text would necessarily be comforting to someone who just lost someone. But what I would hope is that this ‘Requiem’ can be comforting in that it leaves a space for grieving.”
“Requiem” is Episode 22 on CSOtv through July 23; order.cso.org Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer. The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains complete editorial control over assignments and content.