There is an immediate sensation that comes with the first two echoing chords of Gregory Spears’ Requiem that transports you to the echoing stone walls, labyrinthine floors, and diamantine stained glass windows of Chartres or Notre Dame. Recorded in 2011 and premiered in 2010, it is one of those works that connects the legacies of Machaut and Vitry to those of contemporary minimalist maestri such as Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen.
While the 19th Century was dominated by pushing voices to the extremes in terms of power, heft, volume, and colors, the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st Centuries have brought a newfound austerity. Gone is the ideal among composers to write for 4,000-seat houses packed with velvet seats and gilded plaster. Back is writing for smaller, intimate spaces that provide more acoustical support and subsequently facilitate a cooler approach to singing. Sure, the brick-and-mortar walls of a nightclub or industrial space turned performance venue may not have as much character as a Medieval cathedral, but the effects are strikingly similar.
Spears’ Requiem is the latest in a line of contemporary pieces that owes much to early music predecessors. Steve Reich’s Tehillim, setting Psalms like 19:2–5 and 18:26–27, bursts with a modern exuberance yet with a musical framework that predates the Medieval era, bringing into play the cadences and progressions of the ancient Assyrians and threading it throughout the subsequent history of monophonies and polyphonies. Frank Ferko’s work owes much to Hildegard von Bingen, particularly in his Hildegard Motets and recent Stabat Mater. David Lang’s Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning work the little match girl passion blends Bach and Hans Christian Andersen to create a hauntingly, ethereal work of postminimalism that thunders with the echoes of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
“In some ways things have come full circle, and the further you go in one direction, you eventually meet the other direction,” adds mezzo-soprano and Requiem performer Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, who remembers a time when her ensemble, Anonymous 4, commissioned a work from Reich who, after listening to a disc of music from the year 1000 that was chockablock full of clashing seconds and open fifths, jokingly wrote back asking why they needed him to write a new-music piece when they clearly already had it. “They were writing really out-there things over a thousand years ago—the composers we’re kind of doing now and rediscovering in a way. It breaks the rules that came later and, therefore, when you sing a lot of that, as a new-music singer you know how to do it, too; you know how to bring that out.”
But perhaps it’s the Danes that most thrived in this setting (and, unsurprisingly, Lang’s “match girl” was recorded by vocal group Ars Nova Copenhagen, whose bread and butter are such contemporary works that bear early music fingerprints). And that’s, in turn, where Spears came into play.
A composer who grew up steeped in the musical tradition of Reich and American minimalism, Spears’ first experience with early music was twofold: working at the Spoleto USA festival as a member of the orchestra management crew, Spears by his own account “was totally entranced” by that season’s offering of Cavalli’s Giasone, conducted by period specialist Harry Bicket. “It was a totally visceral reaction,” Spears explains. “And it was the first chance I had to be that close to the instruments and sit in that world for hours on end. That was my first real hook into it.”
At the same time, Spears quickly adds that Reich’s own influence taken from the early music modes came into play much earlier and may account for how he heard Cavalli’s opera. “I realized I wasn’t discovering [early music] for the first time,” he says of his time with Cavalli at Spoleto. “It was paradoxically a return to what had originally attracted me to contemporary music, which was these sort of pure sounds. These sounds had a quality of being completely contemporary and historically coded in a way that I found fascinating.”
What got Spears on a plane to Denmark was Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, namely his own work for Ars Nova Copenhagen, Statements. The brief eight-movement piece rings with an austerity and limned Scandinavian tones akin to those of the vocal lines in Spears’ Requiem, which also bears the creative touches of his eventual mentor and teacher in Copenhagen, Per Nørgård. Over much of the 20th Century, Nørgård created a juxtaposition of lush colors and muted excess in early works like his Winter Cantata and Singe die Gärten mein Herz, die du nicht kennst, the latter of which starts on a very similar proclamatory but modest pair of harp chords as the prelude to Spears’ own work.
“There’s also a lot of joy and playfulness and kind of coolness in the music, too,” the composer adds. “That’s similar in some ways to early music in the sense that I find that early music often has a kind of a cool steadiness running underneath it that I find very attractive both as an American and as someone influenced by minimalism and the Scandinavian aesthetic.”
What’s even more lucrative for the sort of idiom in which Reich, Lang, Nørgård, and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen have dealt—and which Spears, along with several other members of the new generation of composers, stands to inherit—is that it’s an incredibly appropriate style for singers in the 21st Century. Critics often bemoan the dearth of Sutherlands, Pavarottis, Domingos and Callases, whose instruments were essentially cavities of sound that could project domes of excessive and heady 19th-Century masterworks. However, as we’re learning by being living and active participants in this era, such things are cyclical. And while a violinist can perform a work by Tchaikovsky on a violin made during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime, each voice is an instrument unique to the practitioner rather than the composer, regardless of how much training one singer has.
“Inevitably it has that productive dissonance between how it’s trained and, as a person, it’s always contemporary and it’s always unique, always very personal,” says Spears, before quickly adding: “And that’s what I love. When you hear early music, it feels like you’re actually encountering an embodiment of history. That’s such a thrill.”
Like Spears, Horner-Kwiatek came to early music via new music and couldn’t be happier or more at home in either style. Living in London before moving to the United States, the Irish-born mezzo had no shortage of resources for contemporary music in a city known for adventurous programmers and composers. Even when singing with more traditionally early music groups like Harry Christopher’s the Sixteen, it seemed that Horner-Kwiatek’s performance résumé still continued to rack up contemporary pieces, such as when the Sixteen performed at the Royal Opera House in Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain. “They wanted an early music sound for an ensemble in the opera,” she explains. “We had to be this kind of group of religious nomads, monk-like creatures, and so they wanted this very much church sound but had incredibly complex, crunchy melodic lines and [was] all over the place.”
It’s a path that’s becoming more and more common among singers today. Look, for example, at the singing roster for New York’s Trinity Wall Street and you’ll find a number of singers as omnipresent in the choir stalls as they are in contemporary music venues like (Le) Poisson Rouge and Galapagos Art Space. They, like Horner-Kwiatek, possess the essential elements of openness, curiosity, and the willingness and ability to play with her instrument that keep careers, lives, and checkbooks balanced.
“I think the attraction to early music was that I didn’t have to make my voice bigger than it wanted to be,” Horner-Kwiatek says of her eventual shift to a greater presence in the early music world thanks to her role in Anonymous 4. “The flexibility of colors that is actually a necessity in new music is also prized in early music and Baroque music, certainly as a soloist. Your voice can be flexible and can have different colors, so I think those two definitely speak to each other.”
Horner-Kwiatek, who is also a voice teacher, often finds with students who wish to sing similar music that it’s not a question of volume but coloration (though, by her own admission, the term “straight-tone” is anathema to her). The purity of tone that entranced Spears, she explains, is the product of performance settings that allowed the voice to carry without too much effort or projection. This is, in effect, singing at its most natural form. That’s not to say, however, that the music is easy or unchallenging. Such music interweaves vocal lines intricately with focuses on balance, rhythmic interplay, and sensitivity to nuances.
“You need the flexibility with the voice, with the color,” explains Horner-Kwiatek. “And also you need the ability to listen and be aware. In Greg’s Requiem, there’s a lot of writing for the two female voices so that you’re aware how your line relates to the other line and so that you can bring out your color accordingly and really hit those spicy, crunchy lines, or you can bring out the rhythmic interplay with the two voices.”
It makes for a different technique, but one in which singers like Horner-Kwiatek love to luxuriate, enjoying each crunch and hint of spice. With a bit of nakedness in terms of orchestral accompaniment, it’s easy for many moments in Spears’ Requiem to sound like a mistake, but with a coherent group of singers continually responding to one another and avoiding the muddied tones that come with imbalance, all sounds deliberate. In turn, it becomes a delicious experience for the listener.
All of this calls to mind the theory that was recently postulated by Adam Gopnik for the New Yorker called the “Golden 40-Year Rule.” Written in response to the runaway popularity of AMC’s drama Mad Men, Gopnik’s argument proclaims, “the prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between 40 and 50 years past.” (Gopnik isn’t the only one to theorize on nostalgia: other outlets, from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly to Vanity Fair break this same cycle into 12-, 15-, 20-, and 30-year shifts.)
In a certain way, the early music revival is right on track: Reich’s Tehillim was written in 1981. Nørgård most productive period with choral works was between 1975 and 1984. We’re almost at the 50th anniversary for Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles and just passed that same landmark year for Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, two works that Spears praises for a similar scaled-back vision of a work that, in the sense of Mozart, Verdi, and Brahms, is less weightless and more epic. Break up the last millennium into enough half-century chunks and you’ll probably hit on troves of equally potent connections.
Even further into the nostalgic realm, Spears’s Requiem (written for choreographer Christopher Williams) was conceived in such a way that it would be performed by both singers and dancers, incorporate movements of the Catholic Requiem mass alongside texts from 19th-Century Breton authors and 16th-Century poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf.
But is there more at play than mere cycling and recycling? Is this, for instance, a byproduct of the newfound austerity at play since the global financial crisis? Is this music, within means that moves beyond measure, a work that Spears struggled to make bigger than the sum of its parts? Can such austerity in fact lead to a richer experience in the midst of movements to embrace voluntary simplicity?
Spears considers this question for a moment before answering.
“Part of the paradox that draws us to make work is finding this kind of amazingly rich, endlessly expanding world within materials that history seems not to have passed over but don’t really lie in the center of our experience,” explains Spears. “History is this kind of amazingly progressive place in a way.”
