Barrel Strength

One is always told that Smirky Chimp, aka George W. Bush, is a divisive figure. And now we learn this:

Authorities said brother-in-laws Jose Ortiz and Sean Shurelds were involved in a verbal altercation over Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton when the argument escalated into a stabbing inside their family home on Honey Locust Court in Upper Providence.

Authorities said Ortiz, a registered Republican and Clinton supporter, allegedly stabbed Shurelds, an Obama supporter, in the stomach.

I was thinking about the nature of the Estonian composer Arvo Part’s music the other night as I was listening to the glorious and completely perfect rendition of it by the Elora Singers under Noel Edison. I was hearing Part not as a modern composer but as someone who has gone back to the musical composition styles of Orlando Gibbons, Tallis, Monteverdi, and Palestrina, and Orthodox Church composers unknown to me. That he is a Christian composer is obvious. He is composing religious music in the style of all three Christian denominations: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. He says the choice of language determines for him the musical style, so that if commissioned to do something in English it sounds like a commentary on English Renaissance compositional techniques, for instance. It could be so, but I suspect he is being way too coy. I think he is deliberately going back to the idea of music as it originally was in those times: religious, devotional, and even private – not meant for more than 12 people in the audience, maybe fewer. The number of musicians required to play his music is likewise small. It is as if he has decided that the whole western musical tradition needs to start anew, with very small ensembles, and get away from the titanic emotional outpourings of the 19th century, the bizarre ideological nonsense of the mid 20th, and return music to its roots in the expressions of the soul.

Try a comparison of the Beatitudes, which ends with Petrenko’s triumphal blast from the organ, and De Profundis, in Latin. One sounds so English in style, the other so Latin. Or at least English and Latin as interpreted by some talented musicological alien. His Orthodox work in Kanon Pokajannen is equally true to that tradition.

In any case I think with Part we are in the presence of a complete reinvention and rediscovery of music, which is not trying to go forward, but to go back to its wellsprings in expressions of faith.

See if that interpretation makes any sense for you.