A Concert of the Music of Rachel J. Burckardt in Review
Modus Operandi Orchestra and Tutti Music Collective Choir
Justin Bischof, Conductor
Ciarán Nagle, Irish Tenor; Ken Field, Alto Saxophone; Rachel J. Burckardt, piano & electric guitar; Diana Fischer, piano;
Darby Clinard, mezzo-soprano; Kayleigh Bennett, mezzo-soprano; Phil Neighbors, drums; Blake Newman, double bass
Recital Hall at SUNY Purchase Performing Arts Center
September 28, 2024
Ever since Brahms composed A German Requiem in the German language to a Lutheran text, composers have been adapting the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass to more modern conceptions of musical styles and textual freedom. Increasingly in the 20th century, composers began to deviate from the traditional order of the liturgy, picking and choosing which sections to set to music, and sometimes blending secular with sacred texts. Benjamin Britten’s 1961 War Requiem intersperses movements from the traditional Latin text with poems of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in World War I. Stravinsky’s 1966 Requiem Canticles is a twelve-tone setting of a fifteen-minute version of the Mass for the Dead. John Tavener’s 2006 Requiem mixes traditional Roman Catholic texts with the Upanishads and the Koran. Karl Jenkins’s 2005 Requiem mixes the Japanese language together with Latin.
One recent manifestation of this break from the strictures of the past is the increasing use of crossover elements from pop genres and light classical music in newer requiems, particularly the Requiems of John Rutter and Andrew Lloyd Webber, composed in the mid-1980s and widely performed. Some have termed this new genre “Sacro-Pop” although its real progenitor is arguably Leonard Bernstein’s 1971 Mass. Rock beats are common to newer arrangements of traditional hymns in Catholic missalettes and other hymnals.
Actually, contemporary “sacro-pop” composers may enjoy the largest audiences of any contemporary composers. Marty Haugen, a Lutheran who has worked as a musician in the Catholic church, may be the most performed composer in America. His Mass of Creation is played, sung, and heard by millions worshipping every Sunday (I myself have performed it countless times as an organist.) Such widely performed secular choral composers as Morton Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre subsume lighter classical styles into their sacred works, while many other composers (even priest-composers like Michael Joncas), writing like Karl Jenkins, have brought jazz, rock beats, and minimalism into church service music, at times blending it with traditional gospel.
Rachel J. Burckardt fits in this mold. She is a Boston-based civil engineer who has been a committed liturgical musician (singer and instrumentalist) at St. Cecilia’s Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts for some forty-five years. She is also a prolific composer of mass parts and sacred songs for the Roman Catholic Mass, and a transgender Catholic (preferring the pronoun she) who transitioned in mid-life after years of marriage and parenthood. This all-Burckardt concert featured the New York debut of her forty-five-minute Mount Auburn Requiem (for orchestra, chorus, and Irish tenor), and also included four short quasi-sacral chamber works. The New York-based Modus Operandi Orchestra was conducted (as was the chorus, the Tutti Music Collective Choir) with a sure hand by its artistic director Justin Bischof, a highly gifted organ improviser and experienced conductor of both church and secular music.
It was evident from this concert that both Ms. Burckardt’s sacred music and her secular concert music are a seamless blend embodying eclectic styles, genres, and crossover. The first work on the program, For Elaine and Steve, written for her son’s wedding, was arranged for the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, a combo of alto sax (Ken Field), drums (Phil Neighbors), and bass (Blake Newman), joined here by piano (the composer). With repeating loops and grooves on the piano, the saxophone took the lead in a New Age, easy listening jazz idiom that would have been at home in a club setting. The saxophone was amplified through loudspeakers on stage (more about that later). Next came a short setting of the Ave Maria for mixed chorus: pleasant, consonant, well-crafted choral writing, well sung (if with a ragged ensemble moment or two) by the aforementioned Tutti Music Collective Choir, a Boston-based group that strives to perform LGBTQ and BIPOC composers.
Heal Me With Your Care, with textadapted from Psalms 34 and 121,was set for two mezzo-sopranos (Darby Clinard and Kayleigh Bennett) and orchestra, and reminded me a little of the soprano-mezzo-soprano duet in the Agnus Dei of Verdi’s Requiem. Both mezzos were uni-miked through the loudspeakers, and though they sang not just in unison but in part writing, it was hard to tell their voices apart. Though the intent was to spotlight their singing, the instrumental texture, or the sound design, or both, muddied both the diction and the overall orchestral/voice blend. The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble returned for Ascendance, which reverted to the soft rock/modal jazz idiom, with supporting repeating grooves and an apparently improvised section for the saxophone and drums.
Before the performance of her Mount Auburn Requiem in D minor, Ms. Burckardt explained in remarks to the audience that she wrote it to memorialize her deceased high school classmates from the Class of 1972 at Albertus Magnus, a parochial high school in Rockland County, New York. Like a true Baby Boomer, she cited the 1974 Rolling Stones song “Time Waits for No One” as a co-inspiration for this memorialization and implied that the song was quoted in her Requiem (though I didn’t pick it up listening). The text for the Mount Auburn Requiem (Mount Auburn is the name of a cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts) followed an eight-section liturgy of her own design: Introit; Kyrie; Lacrimosa; Carmine sine Verbis; Sanctus; Agnus Dei; In Paradisum; and Vale in Sempiternum. Several of the eight were subdivided into episodes that followed both liturgical tradition and a few select textual innovations of her own. The sung text combined English with Latin.
With the Introit and Kyrie our ears were immediately transported into the familiar, agreeable harmonic territory of Ernest Bloch, solemnized sacro-pop, and film scores of Biblical epics. An alto saxophone solo was amplified through the loudspeakers over the orchestra at the same moment the concertmaster was giving her all to a moving violin solo which as a result was lamentably drowned out. Some of the chords and part writing of the choir and the orchestra worked well together, others seemed not to mesh or were awkwardly dissonant in the overall consonant idiom. The Kyrie was an attractive homage to the block chords of Carmina Burana, devolving into the accompanimental filler of repeated loops and grooves and occasional hints of rock beats.
The Lacrimosa was one of the most successful musical movements. It “landed.” The passing tones didn’t sound oddly random but rather functionally dissonant. There was a good use of the tubular bells and timpani as atmospheric color. Here Ms. Burckardt wrote a solo for cello, and this time it was supported by a light texture and came through well.
The four-part Songs without Words (Carmine sine Verbis) was an innovation. An affecting viola solo was taken over by the cellos, then by the tutti (i.e., not just the Tutti Music Collective Choir). Though the opening material overstayed its welcome, the introduction in the fourth song of the Mount Auburn Aire, Ms. Burckardt’s original Irish-style tune, was haunting, and well set for flute solo and violin drone, with the flute part knowingly written with the characteristic ornamentation of the sean-nós (“in the old way”) of Irish traditional singing. (The composer told the audience during her remarks that her mother was Irish Catholic.)
The Sanctus was also attractive, but by the time we got to the Agnus Dei, too many melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic gestures were being recycled from previous movements. The Agnus Dei commenced solemnly in the minor key, not always the conventional musical choice for a Lamb of God, but switched to major for parts of it. The most affecting parts of In Paradisum for me were, again, the appearance of Irish airs: the well-known traditional ballad Slane, and a reprise of Burckardt’s own Mount Auburn Aire, once again lightly scored and with the sean-nós ornamentation. I thought the Irish tunes were the most moving and striking moments of the Requiem and wished there had been more elaboration of them. I waited vainly for the Irish tenor soloist, Ciarán Nagle, to break in with a vocal line ornamented like sean-nós–a missed opportunity for the composer’s creative invention.
But by the time the Requiem reached its conclusion with Vale in Sempiternum, Ms. Burckardt again fell back into recycling the same D minor chords, riffs, and grooves already iterated through the previous several movements. The effect became too static. The too many chimes entries, meant to toll like funeral bells, lost freshness as a gesture, as did the timpani strokes. And more creative variety of keys, modes, and some modulations would have helped give the three-quarters of an hour of music more purchase on the ear.
Throughout the concert, an unfortunate impediment to appreciation of Ms. Burckardt’s music was a fuzz or buzz on the sound (at least from where I was sitting near the front), which I interpreted as an unintended artifact of the multi-microphone set-up on stage (apparently for recording the live performance) and the decision to amplify the saxophone and the vocal soloists through onstage loudspeakers, always a risky bet for clarity. Microphoning the soloists in this case seemed to ensnare adjacent orchestral instruments and redundantly play them back over their natural acoustic projection, a feedback loop which clotted up the texture and was confusing to the ear. It was hard to tell if Mr. Nagle’s singing didn’t land because of the ambient recording set-up, because the composer hadn’t written his vocal part robustly enough, because he didn’t sing out, or because he was under-miked.
It was clear, though, that while Ms. Burckardt wrote effectively for solo instruments accompanied by light textures, she handled full textures of the orchestra less felicitously. The orchestra played well, but transparent orchestration was lacking. The Tutti Music Collective Choir did not always sound as present and forward in the overall acoustic as they should have, although at times their singing was quite lovely. The most vigorously impressive performer of the evening was alto saxophonist Ken Field, and I also admired the gutsy playing of the violin leader Keiko Tokunaga.
Nevertheless this concert was an impressively large and courageous effort to put forward the creative profile of a composer.
