On Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri, Shaw's To the Hands, and Wadsworth's Ad Latus
Amor Artis’s last concert, on New Year’s Eve, featured the music of J. S. Bach. This afternoon we’ll turn to the music of another German master, Buxtehude—a figure who loomed so large over the German musical scene in the late seventeenth century that in 1705, young Johann Sebastian requested leave from his post in Arnstadt and traveled 250 miles—on foot—to Lübeck, in northern Germany, to learn from him. (Handel and Mattheson had also paid the master a visit, a few years earlier). Though Bach was planning to stay for only a month, he remained in the city for fourth months to absorb as much as he could from the master. Buxtehude had become the organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck when he was only thirty. He would remain there for nearly forty years, until his death in 1707. This longstanding plum position afforded Buxtehude the chance to indulge his entrepreneurial instincts, building a solo career as an organ virtuoso and acting as a manger-impresario to organize a successful concert series. His keyboard works garnered admiration for their display of contrapuntal virtuosity, his innovative vocal works pushed the boundaries of scale and genre, and his study of instruments burnished his credentials as a master of both theory and practice. He epitomized the ideal of the universal musician and thriving town Kapellmeister, which Bach would later embody in Leipzig, and foreshadowed the notion of the autonomous composer-at-large that would be realized in later centuries.
Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri demonstrates his craft and polish. Its innovative concept defies easy classification. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a Passion-reflection for Holy Week. Unlike the passions of Bach, which relay the biblical story directly, with pauses in the narrative for reflective arias, Buxtehude’s work is contemplative and non-narrative. The full title of the work, Membra Jesu Nostri Patientis Sanctissima, translates literally: Most Holy Members of Our Suffering Jesus. It comprises a cycle of seven cantatas, each one dedicated to a different body part of Christ on the cross: It begins at his feet and works upward from knees, hands, side, breast, and heart, finally, to his face. Each cantata has six sections: 1. An opening instrumental sonata, which establishes the prevailing mood and key; 2. A movement for chorus and instruments in concerto-style dialogue based on a short biblical passage; 3.–5. A series of three arias based on strophic poetry, with instrumental ritornellos between each; and 6. A repeat of the choral movement.
The non-Biblical portions of the work’s text come from a medieval Latin poem, Salve Mundi Salutare, very popular in Germany during Buxtehude’s lifetime. The gruesome and graphic subject matter—fatal torture by crucifixion—inspired poetry imbued with a sense of passionate devotion that is almost startling to the modern reader. Buxtehude wrote on the title-page of the manuscript score that the work should be “sung with the humblest devotion of the whole heart.” His choice of text reflects some of the trends in German Lutheranism at that time. Meditations on the Passion were understood to involve reciprocal love: Christ’s immense love for mankind, exemplified in his sacrifice, begat love for the dying bridegroom, admiration for the physical body on the cross, and desire for eventual union after death. The earlier part of the seventeenth century saw a resurgence in medieval mysticism, and the notion of the unio mystica (mystical union), an almost corporeal union of the believer and Christ, is echoed in the poetry Buxtehude chose for Membra. Armed with the expressive devices burgeoning in seventeenth- century musical style, a composer could employ musical gestures to exploit the colorful imagery of these texts. Indeed, the opening sonatas and choral movements of each cantata establish a pervasive atmosphere by repeating rhetorical gestures in the music. But in the arias, where the poetic texts teem with passionate devotion, Buxtehude shows restraint. His deft syllabification and phrasing create effortlessly flowing vocal lines that transmit the seductively rounded rhymes directly. The trio sonata instrumental texture of two solo violins and continuo adds to the intimate character. Taken as a whole, the set of cantatas compels the fervent believer to view the scene at the cross and see reflected back not death itself but freedom from death through Christ’s great sacrifice.
As Amor Artis’ mission is to illuminate the relationship between Renaissance, Baroque, and Contemporary music, our concerts often bring together music of earlier eras with music written within the last hundred years. Today’s program presents the Buxtehude’s seventeenth- century masterpiece alongside very recent works by three living composers: Gregory Spears, Caroline Shaw, and Zachary Wadsworth. By embracing older musical styles and translating them into their own musical language, these three composers help us fulfill our mission in a direct way. The works by Shaw and Wadsworth, in fact, were written explicitly as reflections on Buxtehude’s work. They integrate direct quotations into their own music, which reflects and refracts Buxtehude’s. In my own experience, discovering which musical gestures the imaginations of these living composers zeroed in on has broken open my own listening and exposed new resonances in the ancient score. Putting new works in dialogue with the Buxtehude has revivified it, from a museum artifact that we try to present faithfully, to a living, breathing, porous musical expression. Today’s program will alternate between four cantatas from the Buxtehude, the works of these three composers, and an arrangement of my own.
The first cantata, Ad pedes (To the Feet), opens with two strong C minor chords that throw back the curtain on the unfolding scene. A noble, insistent motive introduced in the violins points upward. The choir echoes it, singing “Behold! Up on the mountains come the feet of one bringing good tidings.” Buxtehude’s music bids us look from low to high, to take in not just the pierced feet, but the entire scene on Calvary, to find in the ghastly sight a sign of hope and peace. The solo arias proclaim the embrace of the pained body on the cross (“With what ardor I embrace those nails which pierce Thy blessed feet!”) In the second cantata’s point of focus rises from the feet to the knees (Ad genua). The knees aren’t pierced and bloody, like the feet, but bent gently in the weariness of death. Buxtehude’s music and choice of text again find a brighter meaning in the dark scene at the cross. The lilting triple-time choral movement, in a warm E-flat major, sets a text from Isaiah: “You will be brought to nurse, and dandled on her knees.” In the opening sonata, to evoke a doting intimacy like that between mother and baby (or the believer and Christ), Buxtehude employs a technique he reserves for the most special moments: The violins play the sonata in tremulo, gently nudging the pulse along with their bows, through beautiful harmonic sequences. It’s a wholly different atmosphere from the opening of the first cantata.
The Agnus Dei by Gregory Spears was arranged from a movement of his Requiem, which brings texts from the traditional Latin Requiem into an imaginative multi-movement work loosely inspired by a Breton fairy tale. Combining elements of a medieval sound world with Spears’ own fresh musical language, it opens quietly and evocatively, with a lulling harp figure accompanying a solo baritone’s incantation of the first petition of the Agnus Dei text. Gradually other threads of sound weave their way in, forming a layered, kaleidoscopic soundscape. Sudden, dissonant chords in the harp rend the musical fabric, and its threads unravel and fray, leaving just whispered, stuttered snippets of the incantation atop the harp and organ’s continued exploration of dissonance. The men’s voices return to sustain the final word, sempiternam (“everlasting”), via a seamless exchange of the four tones of an unresolved chord. The ritual retreats into silence.
The next of Buxtehude’s cantatas, Ad manus, contemplates the hands of the crucified Christ. With our hands, we touch, we feel, we grasp, we greet. The hands of Christ on the cross, of course, are driven through with nails, pierced, and bloody. The wound on a body part of such importance and such intimacy is deeply felt, and communicated in Buxtehude’s opening sonata and choral movement with a repeated eighth-note figure evoking nails and anguished dissonances on the word plagae (“wounds”). Rhythm takes a back seat to harmony, and Buxtehude indulges repeatedly in the pain and pleasure of dissonance followed by consonant release. The music asks: “What are those wounds in your hands?” I’m always impressed, when I conduct this piece, how perfectly a beat, or a measure of rest, conveys the question mark.
Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands picks up on that questioning silence and uses it as a point of access. She was commissioned by The Crossing to compose a response to Buxtehude’s third cantata, Ad manus. Here are her own notes about the work:
To the Hands begins inside the seventeenth-century sound of Buxtehude. It expands and colors and breaks this language as the piece’s core considerations—of the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge, and of our role and responsibility in these global and local crises—gradually come into focus.
The prelude turns the tune of Ad manus into a wordless plainchant melody, punctured later by the strings’ introduction of an unsettling pattern. The second movement fragments Buxtehude’s choral setting of the central question, “Quid sunt plagae istae in medio manuum tuarum,” or “what are these wounds in the midst of your hands?” It settles finally on an inversion of the question, so that we reflect, “What are these wounds in the midst of our hands?” We notice what may have been done to us, but we also question what we have done and what our role has been in these wounds we see before us.
The text that follows in the third movement is a riff on Emma Lazarus’ sonnet The New Colossus, famous for its engraving at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem’s lines, “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and its reference to the statue’s “beacon-hand” present a very different image of a hand—one that is open, beckoning, and strong. No wounds are to be found there—only comfort for those caught in a dangerous and complex environment. While the third movement operates in broad strokes from a distance, the fourth zooms in on the map so closely that we see the intimate scene of an old woman in her home, maybe setting the table for dinner alone. Who is she, where has she been, whose lives has she left? This simple image melts into a meditation on the words in caverna from the Song of Solomon, found in Buxtehude’s fourth cantata, Ad latus.
In the fifth movement the harmony is passed around from one string instrument to another, overlapping only briefly, while numerical figures are spoken by the choir. These are global figures of internally displaced persons, by country, sourced from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) data reported in May 2015 (accessed on 20/03/2016 at www.internal-displacement.org). Sometimes data is the cruelest and most honest poetry.
The sixth and final movement unfolds the words in caverna into the tumbling and comforting promise of “ever ever”—“ever ever will I hold you, ever ever will I enfold you.” They could be the words of Christ, or of a parent or friend or lover, or even of a nation.
To my ear, To the Hands, like other vocal works by Caroline Shaw, teems with humanity. She finds the essential, expressive qualities of the human voice and uses them to communicate, with or without words. She writes with an awareness that choral singing is an act of community. And through her melding of word and sound, she has created a piece through which we might start to think about issues in our world. She has said, “I think there’s something about engaging with political issues specifically in choral music because it’s a very community-oriented art. There is, or at least there used to be, a really great tradition of community choirs around the world. You can write something that people sing together and talk about with each other, and that’s where the conversations have to start.”
Buxtehude’s fourth cantata, Ad latus (To the Side), reimagines the pierced flank of Christ on the cross, dripping with blood, as a cleft in a rock face in which a dove might find refuge. The poetry for the first aria hails “my dearest Savior’s side, wherein the sweetest honey lies, wherein the might of love is seen, and whence doth gush a fount of blood to cleanse the soiled heart of man.” Buxtehude crafts music that reflects this positive, redemptive spin on suffering by employing a dance-like rhythmic profile. In the opening sonata, the strings leap up and down. The chorus, with a text from the Song of Songs, repeats “Surge, surge”—“Arise, arise.”
This “surge” gesture features prominently in To the Side, by Zachary Wadsworth, which Amor Artis commissioned for this occasion. Standing next to each other in an ensemble in graduate school, Zachary and I discovered a mutual admiration for Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri. When developing the concept for this concert, and choosing a composer to commission, I immediately thought of him. He wrote, of creating this piece:
“I fell in love with Buxtehude’s piece when I first sang it (with Ryan Brandau!) in the Yale Schola Cantorum about a decade ago. At the time, I remember feeling that it was an incredibly tangible piece—from the topic (Christ’s body) to the textures of the music and its almost dance-like rhythms, the piece seemed to explore the sacred through the lens of the living. So, after a long search, I found a wonderful text by the English poet Edward Carpenter that has a similar focus on the body. Using this poem, and combining it with quotations from the Buxtehude, I had a great time exploring how the lovely sounds of the Baroque can permeate and define a piece of contemporary music.
Wadsworth offers the following note about To the Side:
Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri forces us to gaze long and hard at the body of the crucified Christ. In To the Side, I combine a quotation from this piece with a portion of a poem by the English poet Edward Carpenter, who was also a philosopher and an early advocated of homosexual rights. Carpenter’s poetry, like portions of the biblical text quoted here, blur lines between religious devotion and secular love. For every painful and pleasurable stab of Carpenter’s poetry, I inject painful and pleasurable dissonances into the string lines, as the chorus searches for a place removed from this great, turbulent ocean.
Like Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, the African-American spiritual Were You There features a speaker contemplating the scene at the cross. Though it originates in a time and place entirely different from those of the Buxtehude and our contemporary compositions, the hymn, with its memorable melisma on “Oh!” seems to draw from the same spiritual source that inspired Salve Mundi Salutare and Buxtehude’s setting of it.
In the fifth and sixth cantatas, Ad pectus (To the Breast) and Ad cor (To the Heart), not heard this afternoon, the speaker of the poem dedicates her heart to Christ. In the seventh cantata, Ad facie (To the Face), our gaze has at last reached Christ’s face, bloodied by thorns, wet with spiteful spit. As before, the harrowing scene harbors a message of hope. The opening chorus, drawn from Psalm 31, asks Christ to shine his face upon us, and save us in his mercy. An alto solo beckons: “When that hour that I must die shall come . . . Come, Lord Jesus . . . protect me then and set me free!” The final stanza of the entire work goes not to a soloist but to the chorus, who ask together: “And when thou bid’st my soul to flee, O sweetest Jesus, then stand by me. In that hour in love embrace me; Show thy blessed Face to me Upon your sweet and saving Cross.” Buxtehude allows the music to dance with the sing-song rhyme of the Latin. By setting the last piece of poetry as a five-part chorus, Buxtehude starts to shift the perspective of the work to the universal. Then, rather than repeat the choral movement as he has in every other cantata, Buxtehude balances the entire work with a musical bookend in the form of an elegant amen.
Though nearly 340 years old, Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri still has the capacity to evoke an emotional response. This flows in part from Buxtehude’s embedding intimate, individual yearning in a richer musical context, which highlights the subjectivity. The multifaceted significance of the body part in question, contemplated by the solo aria singer, is illuminated by the pervasive affekt of the surrounding choral and instrumental material. Shaw and Wadsworth, too, build intensity with the play between first-person texts and the larger musical fabric. Shaw’s brilliant inversion of “your hands” to “our hands” comes to mind. Both Shaw and Wadsworth pick up on the image of the caverna, the “cleft in the rock,” a small place of refuge, real or imagined, perhaps a secret chamber of the heart, or the curl of an outstretched hand, or the very grooves on a palm. Wadsworth connects the surge (“arise”) to his poet’s oceanic imagery. After two tidal wave crescendos crash ashore as quotations from Buxtehude and then retreat, the music calms. The upper voices of the chorus sing the beginning of the third stanza, “Child of the lonely heart,” simply, barely accompanied, “blindly yearning, darkly exploring,” as if dipping only a toe into the water. After a contemplative pause, the full chorus, divided now into eight parts, wades all the way in. The texture finds new depths as the chorus submerges completely into the warmth of D major, and eddies on “to the great Mother-heart” enfold us in their gentle swirl.
There’s something very engaging and inviting about the way these composers write, and the way they’ve chosen to begin and end their pieces. Their compositions contain echoes of much older music and yet sparkle with fresh, idiosyncratic sounds. At the end of Wadsworth’s composition, out of the oceanic depth of the “great Mother-heart,” the chorus floats up to a suspended, unresolved chord on the word “ascending,” which evaporates into a single violin sound. The piece ends as it began, with instruments leaning on each other in dissonance and resolving into silence. Shaw’s final movement draws to a sumptuous close on a fortissimo D major chord but it, too, segués to a lone, brittle violin sound, padding its way forward. Spears’ Agnus Dei doesn’t so much end as withdraw, like a reverie fading. By taking as their beginning music from the past, and ending with ellipses, these composers signal their awareness that their compositions don’t make a definitive statement so much as contribute to a centuries-old, still ongoing conversation. Like Buxtehude, they play with the power of music not to manipulate but to engage, and to reveal further meaning. Whether contemplating Christ’s ultimate sacrifice, or suggesting the sacrifices we have made on other’s behalves, whether yearning for the love of Christ or the love of one’s fellow man, hearing this music gives us a mirror in which to see ourselves reflected, and carves a cleft in time for a few moments of musical refuge.