This work by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson is built on drones, broadly defined. It is not exactly a mass, although it does use sacred texts, treated in an incantatory way. The texts are from the so-called Nag Hammadi Library , early Christian documents in the Coptic language discovered in the fourth century C.E. These exist in English, but here, there is no effort to address the meanings of the words (the graphics provide no text), and the titles of the individual movements are not the originals but refer to their musical ...
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This work by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson is built on drones, broadly defined. It is not exactly a mass, although it does use sacred texts, treated in an incantatory way. The texts are from the so-called Nag Hammadi Library , early Christian documents in the Coptic language discovered in the fourth century C.E. These exist in English, but here, there is no effort to address the meanings of the words (the graphics provide no text), and the titles of the individual movements are not the originals but refer to their musical qualities. This might seem perverse (akin to a university course on German literature in one of Don DeLillo's novels where applicants who knew German would be denied admission), but it is also true that there is a lot going on in the music itself. An hour of drone music might sound like a lot, but the movements are varied, both among themselves and within themselves. Hear the way the hocket-like voices enter in the middle of "Take the Night Air," generated by a thickening of the electronic textures. That kind of interaction among the electronics, the string quartet of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the singers is key to the structure of the work, which, fascinatingly, allows for some freedom in its realization. Rehearsals for the work, some of which Jóhannsson participated in before his death in 2018, focused on honing those relationships, and he did not rule out a continuation of that process. The voices are fixed but may have, to quote the notes by John Schaefer, the quality of "Renaissance purity, Bulgarian belting, or Stockhausen overtones." All this is to say that the textures of this music are unique and are likely to be experienced as novel even by those who've heard a good deal of what is known as holy minimalism, which traverses some of the same terrain. The work was premiered at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in New York but here was recorded at the Garnisonskirken in Copenhagen, which brings out the effects very well. ~ James Manheim, Rovi
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