THE SEPARATION - The Theater piece from the album "MASS"

from Bobby Previte

DVD

THE SEPARATION - The Theater piece from the album "MASS" main photo

This is gorgeously shot (by Ben Franzen and John Freyer) footage from the Walker Art Center premiere, 2007. all music was recorded by Mell Dettmer and mixed by Bobby Previte. Looks and sounds fabulous. This is the entire piece, running time about an hour.

Info on the piece:

After I finished THE 23 CONSTELLATIONS OF JOAN MIRÓ in 2002, a multimedia chamber piece with text from Miró’s life and slides of his great “Constellation” paintings, I started thinking about writing another large work which would take its direction from an “outside” source. At the same time I began listening again to medieval music, and particularly the MISSA SANCTI JACOBI by Dufay. I fell under Dufay’s spell as a music student in Buffalo, NY.

Guilliaume Dufay (1400-1474) straddled the Medieval and the Renaissance. His music has the austerity of the ancient, but there is something that goes beyond that and points to the modern. I became fixated with the idea of combining Dufay with something of mine, using his mass as my cantus firmus. But, like the sheep in our story, I had no idea what.

Then late one night I happened to be listening to Messiaen’s nine organ pieces, La Nativité du Seigneur. It was like a slap in the face. I soon realized: one, that the piece had to have something to do with this great work also; two, that this new work needed to have an emotional impact in our times equal to what those works had in theirs, and, three, although I don’t count myself among the religious, religion was exactly what this piece was about.

Olivier Messiaen was a 20th century composer who had one of the most radically individual voices in the history of music. A devout Catholic who shocked parishioners with his aggressive, “unreligious sounding” music, Messiaen brought his mysticism to the concert hall, leaving behind a body of work so fiercely individual that the only thing to do with it seems to be to simply listen to it (advice that I did not follow). One doesn’t go through Messiaen, only around him.

Wanting to match the powerful impact of Dufay and Messiaen then, I decided on a highly electric, almost doom metal sound. I mean, who’s more metal than Messiaen? To my way of thinking, rock and especially metal, a music whose imagery is drenched in the gothic and religious, are as concerned with these issues as is conventional religion, and metal reaches for the modern throat with the same deadliness as Messiaen, (and as I’ll bet Dufay did for the 15th century one). What music today has the same raw power to rattle the casements? I reached for the electric guitar.

With such a broad, outward music, I was anxiously awaiting Andrea Kleine’s words, but I was astonished when she presented me with the final text, an intimate, subtle but seductively deceiving atom bomb of a story. What else to do in the face of the barrage of sound I cooked up? The perfect thing. When everyone else is shouting, speak low. This “little”story, (of a sheep, no less), this dark whisper in the tone of a children’s tale proves in the end to be more subversive than all of my sturm and drang.

Dufay’s mass appears here somewhat re-arranged, but essentially verbatim. As Dufay used other melodies as the basis for his works, a common technique at that time, I have used his entire mass as my cantus firmus. I treated the Messiaen very differently, as an inspiration/springboard. I have re-imagined chosen excerpts from the Nativité, rewritten them for an improvising pipe organist, and reconnected them in sequence with each of Dufay’s movements.

THE SEPARATION, then, is a piece in the form of a nine part mass, for choir, pipe organ, electric band and actor. A meeting of Dufay, the pious but politically shrewd and connected ancient, the “greatest’ composer of his time, who wrote humanist music for the church, who occupies an important place directly in the line of the western canon, and who can count untold disciples, and Messiaen, the mystical modern man who in quite the opposite way wrote spiritual music for the secular world, labored in relative obscurity (hell, was practically shunned), was a canon unto himself, and who essentially has no disciples.

I was fortunate to have at my disposal the immense talents of the Rose Ensemble, who somehow sang around and through all the sound, and always on pitch. I believe no other choir in the world could have done what they did. And the band, Marco Benevento and Reed Mathis, two young stars shining brightly on the new music scene.

Bobby Previte
New York, Fall 2008