I'd blink my eyes And wave my arms I'd wish a wish To stop all harm
(From If, by Michael Nyman)
The annual Earth Day on 22 April is a time to pay extra attention to the well-being and state of our planet. What began in 1970 as an awareness campaign about water and air pollution in America, has grown into one of the largest environmental movements in the world. More than 1 billion people from approx. 200 countries are now taking part in demonstrations, projects and initiatives to help protect the earth.
As part of Earth Day, the Flemish Radio Choir will be performing the recent Mass for the Endangered by American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. Her composition simultaneously represents a mourning song for endangered living beings and a call to action. The 6 movements from the mass are alternated with short interludes for piano by contemporary composers such as Michael Nyman and Bryce Dessner. They offer a moment of reflection, so that we can stop and think about the way we deal with our planet.
A vast landscape
The Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (1946) is a composer who engages with ecological issues, among other things. With each of his works, he wants to convey a message: ‘Most people today live their lives with hardly any faith, love or ideals. The spiritual dimension has been lost. My goal is to nourish the soul, and I preach that in my works.’ Central to his work are the relationship between man and nature, the beauty of life and the imminent ecological and moral destruction of these values.
For Lidzenuma ainavas (Plainscapes), a work for choir, violin and cello from 2002, Vasks found his inspiration in the vast plains in Zemgale, a region in the south of Latvia. In this musical meditation, he tried to capture the elusiveness and changeability of the landscape, which looks different but equally beautiful in every season. The choir sings a wordless vocalise, three times, each time slightly different, as a prelude to the exuberant awakening of nature.
“Like the Catholic Mass, Mass for the Endangered embodies a prayer to a higher power – for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention. But where the Catholic Mass asks God for mercy, our Mass is directed towards nature itself.”
- sarah kirkland snider
A musical prayer for nature
‘One of the ten reasons to fall in love with classical music’, is how The Boston Globe describes Sarah Kirkland Snider's Mass for the Endangered (1973). And that’s not all: other leading media such as The Wall Street Journal, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine are full of praise for Snider’s musical prayer for nature. She owes this fame not only to her cross-genre style, which is somewhere between classical and pop, but also to the urgent theme she addresses in this work. After all, the Mass is a penetrating plea to take care of Mother Earth and all living beings, conveyed in a way that, according to The New York Times, ‘goes beyond environmental activism’.
In terms of form and text, Snider deliberately refers to the tradition of the Catholic Mass. Fragments from the original Latin Mass alternate with prose from librettist Nathaniel Bellows: ‘Nathaniel and I have tried to use the traditional Catholic Mass as a prism through which we worship, celebrate and praise endangered species and the endangered environments in which they live.’
According to Snider, this mass was her first major commission for a choir. It took her back to her childhood and the moments when she sang with the Princeton High School Choir: ‘I loved reminiscing about singing the requiems of Mozart, Brahms and Fauré, the masses of Palestrina and Byrd, and the chorales of Bach.’ In her mass, she tries to connect this centuries-old European vocal tradition with contemporary American folk traditions. And so chants similar to those of the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, fragments of pop music and enchanting minimal music sit alongside each other in her Mass for the Endangered.
Nor did Snider stop at music. Inspired by the poetic language of designer Deborah Johnson, she approached the latter to add a visual component to the Mass. The result is a six-part video series, conceived as a ‘Cathedral of the Cosmos’, a final resting place in the afterlife for all plant and animal species that can no longer survive on earth. Each video reveals a part of that cathedral, from the stained glass windows to the altarpiece. The last video shows the entire structure, as an eternal home for the flora and fauna.
Somewhere between dream and reality
Michael Nyman (1944) and Bryce Dessner (1976) also compose music that flirts with the boundaries of classical music. Nyman is one of the figureheads of the current minimal music scene and is also known as a composer of film music. For example, If for solo piano originally saw the light as part of the soundtrack for The Diary of Anne Frank. Equally moving is Dessner's Song for Octave, a lullaby he composed for his own son in 2020. He wrote it at the request of pianist Bertrand Chamayou, who devoted an entire album to lullabies. Just before bedtime, these songs offer comfort to young children, or even unborn babies, like Alain De Ley’s Berceuse for Zita. In this programme, they provide a moment of reflection, to reflect on what we pass on to the next generations.
Text by Aurélie Walschaert
Info concert
Start to Forage
Saturday 20 April | 14:00 | Flagey - Brussels
exploring urban nature around Flagey: uncover the hidden secrets of the Brussels’ sidewalks with Forest To Plate
