Preach It! A Musical Sermon

My Program: Steve Reich, It’s Gonna Rain (1964)

Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Good Friday Spell (1882)

Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata BWV 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen (1714)

*intermission*

John Adams, Christian Zeal and Activity (1973)

Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Ich wandte mich und sah an alles unrecht, das geschach unter der Sonne (1970)

The case for my program: Preach It! takes a freewheeling perspective on the close ties between religion and the classical tradition, offering a non-dogmatic approach on not only music and religion, but music as religion. This program, which spans three centuries and a broad palette of religious views, directly addresses the role of spirituality, in triumph and crisis, and its place in modern art.

Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, though a tape piece and lacking a role for the orchestra, sets up a powerful introduction to the evening. In 1964, in the midst of the political turmoil of student riots and the Vietnam War, Reich recorded the fervent rant of a Pentecostal preacher in San Francisco and played it back on two separate tapes. The result was a phasing effect, loops gradually unfolding out of sync and creating music from charged rhetoric. Immediately following Reich’s tape work, the orchestra will play Wagner’s Good Friday Spell, an arrangement of leitmotivs from the opera Parsifal, his grandly mysterious final work. Parsifal, the tale of an outsider assuming the leadership of the Knights of the Holy Grail, is as much charged with Christian symbolism as with Buddhist ideology of self-renunciation, which Wagner learned from the great German philosopher Schopenhauer. The Good Friday Spell is music of noble opulence, hovering between operatic drama and religious ecstasy.

Johann Sebastian Bach may be music’s greatest preacher, a composer who designed his sacred works to enrapture the Lutheran congregations for whom he worked. His Cantata No. 12 closes the first half of the program. At its heart is a series of slowly unfurling choral variations, a passacaglia memorializing the “weeping, wailing, fretting, quaking” of the followers of Christ.

After intermission, two recent pieces offer wildly different ideas on religion, American optimism levied against cynical German pessimism. John Adams wrote Christian Zeal and Activity for unspecified ensemble and “found sonic object”; in its most famous version, that ensemble is a full, radiant orchestra, and the accompanying recording a 1971 recorded sermon. The hymn-like music, played by placid strings and harp, will segue immediately into the bleak trombone opening of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s oratorio, what he called an “ecclesiastical action.” Two speakers and a singer desperately intone, even scream, text from the Bible and Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, while a fragmented orchestra drones behind them, finally culminating in a painful quotation of Bach’s chorale Es ist genug. Zimmermann, deeply religious but deeply troubled, could not find peace in his music; five days after completing the score to Ich wandte mich, he took his own life.