| Pro-Arte Singers & Baroque Orchestra in collaboration with the Luminescence Project Mark Brennan Doerries, conductor Vasiliki Tsouva, assistant conductor Alice Baldwin, rehearsal accompanist Ionas Giacomo Carissimi (ca 1604 -1674) William Hudson, Ionas Historicus Arwen Myers, Soprano Lindsey Lang, Alto; Gubernator Navis Matthew Wells, Tenor Thomas Florio, Bass; Deus Aus der Tiefen, BWV 131 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750) Matthew Wells, Tenor Steven Eddy, Bass Aleksandr Fester, oboe Hilary Glen, Cello De Profúndis Anonymous, from Liber Usualis (1896) First United Church of Bloomington 8:00PM – 3 December 2008 |
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De
Profundis If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. Martin Luther King - The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968 The Hope: The persuasive power of hope as an emotional and rational thought process is often underestimated because a precise definition of its nature is difficult to surmise. It is a cliché to state that humans need hope, not to survive, but to live and flourish. Since the early 1980s new schools of research and psychological treatment have developed known as Hope Theory and Positive Psychology. These emerging fields seek to understand the unique role of hope in driving individuals to develop and pursue future goals and ultimately attain them. Hope promises us control and direction when suffering from panic and depression. In the absence of hope we lose the possibility to assert our individuality and maintain control over our conduct; as witnessed daily, humans collapse in a heap of despair and uncertainty, devastated by cascades of inimical fact, when all hope is lost. Standard measurements of hope developed during periods of supervised treatment of the elderly, children, mentally ill, veterans, college students, blind, cancer patients, and drug rehabilitation patients. This corpus of raw data now permits Hope Theory to empirically suggest that individuals with high measures of hope generate more goals, ambitions, and future plans than individuals without hope. In conjunction with the new positive psychology movement that focuses a patient’s treatment on uncovering and encouraging positive experiences and emotions, the scientific community is quickly recognizing the great potential and meaning that hope, both as an emotion and dialectic thought process, encourages in the lives of humans. Hope, an intentionally sustained, rational, and pragmatic quality, is not to be confused with optimism, which spontaneously and unpredictably appears and dissipates. New research in the field of Hope Theory explores how individuals with minimal hope acquire more. Current research suggests that hope is contagious; it is learned behavior most effectively acquired when nurtured from an early age. Playwright Lisa Kron astutely characterized this dilemma in Well: People who are healthy think they know how you could get better, because they imagine having your illness on top of their health. They imagine that sick people have all the resources they do and they’re just not trying hard enough. But we don’t. I don’t. For Kron and many others hopelessness could readily be substituted for sick. Modeling hopeful behavior, therefore, is the most effective approach to stimulating hopeful reasoning and emotions in others and encouraging individuals and communities toward future mindedness and goal oriented sustainable living. We assemble this evening to create a critical mass of individuals with high and low levels of hope, to claim hope as a collectively shared value, and to model physical and psychological behaviors of hopefulness. Tonight’s performance, De Profundis, asserts that out of great despair arises profound hope. Fused together, the works of Carissimi and Bach present a modern re-interpretation of the medieval liturgical drama. While the dramatic form originated during pre-Christian times, the Christian church promoted the performance and creation of sacred dramas for special feast days, specifically Christmas and Easter. On these occasions the liturgical office was interrupted and tropes of text and music inserted that dramaticized the gospel texts for the day’s feast. As the dramas moved out of the sanctuary and into church courtyards, Latin quickly gave way to the vernacular languages of French, English, and German, and the ritualized formats disappeared while maintaining the sacred subjects, Narratives illustrated the miracles or mysterious events surrounding characters from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the saints; an extraordinary number of dramas were dedicated to chronicling the miracles of the Virgin Mary. Eventually the characterizations moved beyond biblical accounts and began dramatizing commonly held mythologies about saints, Mary, and Jesus without scriptural substantiation. Tonight’s concert of De Profundis combines music not originally set for a liturgical drama in an effort to illuminate the powerful message of hope. Although the texts and subjects chosen by Carissimi and Bach are based on specific religious paradigms, the substance at the core of these works is universal and transcends any religion, creed, nationality, or entrenched dogma. Hope, therefore, strives to be all encompassing and without limits. The oldest definition of worship is to ascribe worth to an object or shared value. Performing in a sacred space and invoking the ritualistic elements of high worship connotes a sense of shared emotional space and community ethics. Tonight we worship hope in its most authentic form. The Music: Carissimi’s Ionas and J.S. Bach Aus der Tiefen, rufe ich depict images of the human spirit eclipsed by darkness, where the soul can no longer bolster itself alone and must cry out for help. It is at this anguished moment that we begin our evocation of a liturgical drama. The De Profundis chant calls worshipers to gather and participate in a collective process of climbing out of desperation and hopelessness. The chant initiates our worship of hope by naming the emotions of helplessness and fear. Giacomo Carissimi’s (ca 1604 -1674) compositional output falls into three distinct categories: liturgical works dominated by masses and motets, non-liturgical sacred works, and more than 140 secular vocal cantatas. The non-liturgical sacred works include the oratorios Balthazar, Ionas, and Jepthe, perhaps his most recognized work. In these oratorios, the historicus (i.e. narrator) was a non-obbligato role, sung by one or more members of the chorus, often changing from one performance to the next. In tonight’s performance of Ionas, the four historicus performers have been drawn from Chorus I, and placed in the balcony to connote their narrative function as opposed to the dramatic function of the double chorus. The historicus performers propel the narrative forward in addition to singing the roles of the Lord and the Helmsman. Ionas is comprised of recitatives sung by the historicus, an aria sung by Ionas, and several double choruses. The chorus takes on a series of representations illustrating the violence of the storm, the terrified mariners aboard the ship, and finally the repenting Ninivites. These choruses structure the oratorio into five scenes: 1. the Lord speaks to Ionas; 2. Ionas flees aboard a ship while the Lord conjures a powerful storm; 3. the mariners confront Ionas and throw him overboard; 4. the Lord commands a large fish to swallow Ionas who cries out to God from the depths of the fish’s stomach; 5. epilogue, the fish regurgitates Ionas, who preaches to the Ninivites and convinces them to cast off their sinful deeds. When Ionas’ spirit reaches its threshold, when all hope has been lost, he cries from inside the fish. While he receives no direct response from God, he fails to recognize that the fish was sent to save him from drowning and to bring him back to God. The fish is not a punishment, despite the likely foul nature of the creature’s cavity. When Ionas fears the worst he becomes blind to the security of the fish; at the moment he abandons all hope, hope already surrounds him. J.S. Bach’s (1685-1750) Cantata BWV 131, Aus der Tiefen, rufe ich, commences at the moment of greatest despair of the spirit and tracks a struggled return to hopefulness. The work dates from Bach’s time in Mühlhausen (1706-07) and is speculated to have been composed in commemoration of the disastrous fire that destroyed large portions of the city in 1707. The text is a compilation of Psalm 130, De Profundis (From the depths, I cry to you, O Lord) and the hymn Herr Jesu Christ, which appears as the choral melody in the tenor and bass arias. The opening sinfonia is characteristic of the early cantatas and the scoring of woodwinds and two-part viola section suggests the influence of French baroque music. The sinfonia is exceptional as it sets in motion the dramatic force of the entire work. The first note, played only by the continuo group, is the germ, the darkness and depth, from which the cries of anguish emanate. The strings and oboe unleash a duet of tortured sighing gestures that are mirrored and expanded by the chorus. Each movement contains a variation of this sighing motive: the melismatic ruminations of the bass’s aria, the descending chromatic and languid Meine Seele harret fugue of the third movement, and the exasperated shouts of the tenor’s aria. It is only upon reaching the final movement that hope is restored; belief in the Lord returns hope to a hopeless world. Bach employs a four-voice permutation fugue to illustrate this exciting and blissful conclusion. A traditional fugue contains a subject and counter subject accompanied by free counterpoint and a limited number of combinations of the melodic material. The permutation fugue in BWV 131 contains four fractal and discreet melodic elements, constructed in such a way as to permit vast combinatorial possibilities, so that the fugue requires almost no additional free counterpoint or episodes. All melodic elements pass through each vocal part and instrumental line; instead of retaining a strict structure where subjects enter in a fixed order, Bach varies the layout of the fugue moving away from a clear cycle of melodic material. The graph below illustrates the initiation of BWV 131’s fifth movement permutation fugue. S A B D B A A C D T A B C B B C A A B C The first four movements of Cantata BWV 131 dwell in abject darkness and anguish, as sighing gestures dominate the musical texture. In the final movement hope returns and the musical material becomes consumed with a unrelenting fugue, the steadfast mechanism of God’s deliverance, ultimate trust. The Staging: The succinct staging used in De Profundis is designed to serve the music and narrative of each work while also removing the barrier between audience and performer. To create a community of individuals modeling hope-filled behavior, listeners must feel as an integral part of the performance experience. No longer is it acceptable for singers to perform and listeners to watch. The age of passive listening is over and a new era of audience immersion in the performance is underway. --Mark Brennan Doerries, 3 December, 2008 |
  Bernard Gordillo, 2008 |
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