Music for March 11, 2018 + The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Vocal Music

• A Simple Song – Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
• Thou Knowest, Lord – Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

Instrumental Music

• Meditation on “Valley” – Gilbert M. Martin (b. 1941)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew.)

• Hymn 686 - Come, thou fount of every blessing (NETTLETON)
• Hymn R132 - As Moses raised the serpent up (GIFT OF LOVE)
• Hymn 533 - How wondrous and great thy works (HANOVER)
• Hymn R189 - Amazing grace! how sweet the sound (NEW BRITAIN)
• Hymn R9 - As the deer pants for the water (Nystrom)
• Hymn 690 - Guide me, O thou great Jehovah (CWM RHONDDA)
• Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 Tone IIa

This Sunday former choir member Kim Bollinger returns to Kingwood for the weekend to sing at our 10:15 service. Kim has been enjoying the peripatetic life of an Army wife, living in places such as Germany, Washington, Rhode Island, and now Georgia as her husband serves our country. 

I'm even more delighted because she is going to sing "A Simple Song" from Leonard Bernstein's Mass. His Mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy in memory of her late husband President Kennedy and was premiered in 1971 at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Bernstein. a Jew, had already written his Symphony No. 3: Kaddish, dedicating it to the memory of Kennedy shortly after his assassination, so with this commissioned he turned to the form of the Catholic mass to honor the memory of Kennedy (a Roman Catholic).

The Mass has fascinated composers for centuries as a musical form, but Bernstein created something new, a "theatre piece for singers, players and dancers" combining not only different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer, and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also different musical styles, including classical and rock music.

As in any theater piece, there is a story and a conflict. Bernstein and his collaborator, Stephen Schwartz (who had already told the story of Jesus in his hit Broadway musical Godspell)

took the Tridentine Mass, a highly-ritualized Catholic rite meant to be recited verbatim, and applied to it a very Jewish practice of debating and arguing with God. The result was a piece that powerfully communicated the confusion and cultural malaise of the early 1970s, questioning authority and advocating for peace. (1)

Partly intended as an anti-war statement, it was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. (music critic Harold Schoenberg wrote of the premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS: “So this MASS is with it — this week? But what about next year?”) In the present day, it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era: in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.

Jaqueline Kennedy (center) and Leonard Bernstein (r)
at the premier of MASS (1971)

MASS begins with a cacophonous prelude of a pre-recorded 12-tone "Kyrie Eleison" played over four speakers, overlapping like people talking over one another at a cocktail party (or during my prelude last Sunday.)  Suddenly, the Celebrant cuts through this with his electric guitar, strumming the open strings to play a G and a D.("G - D," the traditional Jewish way of spelling the name of God without actually saying it.) As the composer Daron Hagen says in his deeply personal analysis of "A Simple Song," it is "a chord that anyone who can pick up the guitar can strum without knowing how to play. So begins a supposedly “simple” song: A Simple Song.

Jackson Hearn (your devoted organist, left) and the
effervescent Kimberly Livingston Bollinger (right) at
lunch on Lake Houston (2014)

(1) https://leonardbernstein.com/works/view/12/mass-a-theatre-piece-for-singers-players-and-dancers