On Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and O'Regan's Triptych
When I was programming our current season, more than a year ago, as the campaigns heated up and the weather cooled down, the noise around me—noisy city streets, noisy airwaves—seemed determined to crowd out my thoughts. Past concerts in the Princeton University Chapel have included requiems, Lenten pieces, and works of a more ethereal nature. But for this year’s concert in the Chapel, I found myself craving music that unabashedly, joyously celebrates its clamor. To begin, what better piece than Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, which opens with a cymbal crash and a blast from the organ? From there, it was a short leap to Benjamin Britten’s Festival Te Deum. That setting, written, like the Chichester Psalms, for a British choral festival, also amplifies the highs and lows of its text, using the organ to brilliant effect. I’ve long appreciated the way the Chichester Psalms, like its close cousin West Side Story, balances Bernstein’s palpable love of a good tune and his facility with infectious rhythms. The hurried, uneven 7/4 meter in the first movement—a psalm of praise and joy—having shaved off a half a beat, reminds me of a child on a dance floor, so enthralled with his surroundings that his little stomping feet are too impatient to wait for the next downbeat.
Seeking another extended work for the program, I cast about for something that shared Chichester’s willingness to admit influences outside of the sphere of classical music. (Bernstein said, of Chichester, which was based largely on musical theater works, “It is quite popular in feeling . . . and it has an old-fashioned sweetness along with its more violent moments.”) Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych fit the bill. O’Regan remains open to all kinds of sound as music. “I think it’s a very fine line between music and noise; I’m not sure if there is a difference particularly. Some people think of it, I suppose, as organized noise, but I love the randomness of sounds that I hear.” His Triptych combines elements of Renaissance polyphony, rock, jazz, and North African music. I’ve performed the work before in an arrangement for chorus and strings, but I’ve been eager to conduct the version for chorus and percussion ensemble. The kinetic quality of those driving rhythms rendered by percussion instruments—the beautiful hailstorm of all of those mallets striking so many instruments—along with the organ, harp, and percussion of the Britten and Bernstein, would truly fill the Chapel with a joyful noise.
Tarik O’Regan’s multifaceted musical style reflects the varied experiences of his life. He was born to an Irish-English father and Algerian mother. He has lived mostly in England but also in New York City and San Francisco. He cites several musical influences: the Renaissance choral music at the heart of the collegiate chapels at Oxford and Cambridge, where he was educated; the music of North Africa, where he spent summers as a youth; the ’60s and ’70s British rock of his mother’s record collection; the jazz on his father’s LPs; and minimalist music. Traces of each of these can be heard across the three movements. The churning ostinato pattern of the first, pulsing with punchy cross rhythm, has origins in the music of North Africa. Of the region’s music, O’Regan notes: “North African music is so highly intertwined, and what I like about that is there’s not so much a divide between what I would call concert music, pop music, and folk music. It’s much more closely put together, much in the same way that I think jazz is today.” It might also reflect the frenetic pace of city life. O’Regan said the first movement “was the first composition that evolved entirely from my New York perspective.” The overlapping phasing rhythms of the upper parts resemble the phasing of pedal effects in rock music (or the reverb-born harmonic blending of ancient cathedrals). The gently arcing polyphony that emerges from the second movement evokes the music of Thomas Tallis. And the catchy tune of the third movement could just as easily be an electric guitar riff. Asked whose recordings he might take to a desert isle, O’Regan names Led Zeppelin. “That’s the music that my mother listened to, but I’ve always enjoyed the band because I think their level of musicianship is so high. They really compose their songs very carefully. But I just love the playing, and I love the rhythmic drive. I love the fact that there is such a dynamic range—very soft songs, very heavy songs.”
O’Regan’s cultural curiosity and ecumenism allow him to absorb aesthetic influences from other art forms and everyday experiences. He speaks reverentially about architecture, for instance: “Whether it’s new architecture or historic architecture, there’s something about these buildings that speaks to people both within the walls, and those outside, and we can all take great inspiration looking at a cathedral or a mosque. Beautiful. I don’t feel alienated by that, because I’m not of that faith, or a Buddhist temple, or a Hindu temple, or the secular temples that we have like Grand Central Station. I see beauty in those buildings, and I think that’s very important: beauty, regardless of the function.” I feel a sense of kinship with O’Regan in his love of New York City, whose “addictive” frenetic buzz he deems “a music of its own with its own rhythms and textures.” We also share a love of the everyday experience of riding the subway. He notes: “It doesn’t matter what your background is, what your ethnicity, nationality, social background, sexuality, whatever it is. You have to sit next to someone on the subway whether you think you’re going to like them or not. There’s a greater understanding of people simply by sitting next to them. It’s so powerful.” Experiencing the crosscurrents of New York’s many immigrant communities inspired O’Regan to explore his own mingled heritage.
Fittingly, the collage of texts that comprise the lyrics for Triptych is as fascinatingly diverse as the music’s blend of styles. Poem fragments by British giants like Blake, Milton, Wordsworth, and Hardy are intertwined with words of the Quaker William Penn, the Muslim poet Mohammad Rajab Al-Bayoumi, the Jewish poet Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, the Hindu poet Bundahis-Bahman Yast, and the Sufi poet Jalalu-’d’Din Rumi. Like Brahms’ collage of texts assembled for Ein Deutsches Requiem or the librettists’ collections for Bach’s cantatas and passions, these texts are powerful because of the way the components interact with each other. Emerging from the inter-textual, transcultural traffic is the sound of our inherent commonality. Reading from one fragment to the next and back again, an ethos emerges. It’s encapsulated by the line from Psalm 133 that ends the first movement, which, in this context, paradoxically, is radically simple and commonplace: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for [people] to dwell together in unity.”
Though Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms ends with the very same lyric, it reflects a different composer and a different cultural-historical moment. Bernstein, famously, was not just a composer but also a conductor, television personality, and educator. He regretted not making more time for composition. Chichester Psalms appeared during a period between 1957 and 1971 in which he produced only the Psalms and one other work, the Kaddish Symphony (No. 3), amounting to just an hour or so of music. (By contrast, the period between 1951 and 1957 saw the creation of three Broadway musicals, a one-act opera, a film score, and a violin concerto). Bernstein took a sabbatical year, 1964–1965, from his directorship of the New York Philharmonic in order to focus on composing. A planned musical based on Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth didn’t pan out. Attempts at composing classical music fell short, too. There is some sense that part of his struggle was determining which style, of the many distinctive classical musical styles of the 1950s and 1960s, was his true voice. The Kaddish Symphony had embraced dissonance and the twelve-tone technique. The Chichester Psalms, by contrast, are straightforwardly, almost politically tonal. Bernstein wrote a poem about his sabbatical year, which includes these lines on the composition of the Chichester Psalms:
For hours on end I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality,
Over the fads of Dada and Chance,
The serial strictures, the dearth of romance,
“Perspectives in Music,” the new terminology,
Physiomathematomusicology;
Pieces called “Cycles” and “Sines” and “Parameters”—
Titles too beat for these homely tetrameters;
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms —
And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
These psalms are a simple and modest affair,
Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square,
Certain to sicken a stout John Cager
With its tonics and triads in E-flat major.
But there it stands—the result of my pondering,
Two long months of avant-garde wandering—
My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.
Bernstein was no stranger to the musical-political statement. In recent years, on the noisy pixel plots of social media, I’ve seen (and posted) his call to arms made after learning of the death of JFK: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more devotedly, more beautifully than ever before.” Notably, for a memorial concert with the New York Philharmonic shortly thereafter, Bernstein eschewed the traditional requiem for Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. Bernstein cited Mahler’s “visionary concept of hope” and summoned “strength to go on striving for those goals Kennedy cherished.” Five years later, he would conduct more Mahler (this time the “Adagietto” from the Fifth Symphony) at Robert Kennedy’s funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As early as 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, he led seventeen Jewish survivors of the St. Ottilien internment camp in a program that included Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. On the eve of Nixon’s second inauguration, January 19, 1973, Bernstein protested with a “Concert for Peace” at the National Cathedral, conducting Haydn’s Mass in a Time of War. And the list goes on. He performed at the Vatican for John Paul II in 1981. With James Levine in 1987, he conducted a benefit concert for AIDS research at Carnegie Hall. Just a year before his death, in 1989, Bernstein refused a National Medal of the Arts in protest of the revocation of an NEA grant for AIDS-related art.
In 1963 Dr. Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, commissioned Bernstein to write a work for the combined choruses of Winchester, Salisbury, and Chichester Cathedrals. Hussey wrote to Bernstein: “I hope you will feel quite free to write as you wish and will in no way feel inhibited by circumstances. I think many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of ‘West Side Story’ about the music.” In fact, much of the material came from the discarded musical The Skin of Our Teeth. But the most intense moment in the Psalms—the tenors’ and basses’ gruff outbursts in the second movement—actually began as a chorus cut from the “Prologue” to West Side Story. Sondheim’s words “Mix—make a mess of ’em! Make the sons of bitches pay” became “Lamah rag’shu goyim Ul’umim yeh’gu rik?” (Why do the nations rage, and the people plot a vain thing?) In 1965, while working on the Chichester Psalms, Bernstein flew to Alabama at the behest of Harry Belafonte to perform at the “Stars for Freedom Rally” alongside Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Tony Bennett, and Mahalia Jackson. Intercultural conflict couldn’t have been far from his mind, whether it be the turf wars of the Jets and Sharks, or the fight for racial justice in Alabama and across the United States.
In 1973, Leonard Bernstein would conduct the Chichester Psalms at a concert for the Pope, televised all over Europe. In September 1989, Bernstein conducted the work at a concert in Warsaw marking the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. The orchestra and choruses were Polish, the soloists Polish and American. The program included Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, narrated by the granddaughter of a holocaust victim, and Penderecki’s Polish Requiem. This was just a few months before Bernstein famously conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its choral movement An die Freude (Ode to Joy), at the Berlin Wall, substituting for the titular Freude (joy) the word Freiheit (freedom). Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy transforms it into a radical statement about brotherhood and togetherness. “Your magics join again what custom strictly divided.” The famous tune is the essence of simplicity. Everyone here could hum its stepwise simplicity in near-perfect unanimity. Beethoven dreamt of a joy so deep and universal that it could bring us all back together, and fashioned it in idealistic music that he would never hear outside his own mind. That Bernstein fervently believed in such an idea is evident not only in his politically motivated conducting exploits but in his own compositions. You can’t help but hear the optimism of the rising seventh in “There’s . . . a . . . place for us.”
And, of course, there’s closing moment of the Chichester Psalms. In the last measures of the piece, Bernstein revives the chords that open the entire work to set the words “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for people to dwell together.” The accompaniment disappears, leaving just the choir, who sing, as quietly and as slowly as possible, sustained chords charged by twinges of dissonance. When the chords resolve on the last repetition of yachad, the music reflects the meaning of that word, which is “together.”
Where can one dwell in peace? Why do the nations rage so furiously? Will we ever again feel a sense of oneness and unity? Such concerns generate quite a clamor in our current chaotic moment. What would Bernstein have to say about our own time, and how would he enter the fray? Would he be tweeting his opinions to the world? Organizing concerts? Twenty-six years after his death, even if some of the arguments remain the same, the way we discuss them does not. Much ink has been spilled about the insidious impact of echo-chamber intra-enclave dialogue. Blitzes of 140-character cherry-bombs leave the mind and nerves too tattered to tolerate complex conversation. Chyrons flash below talking heads before stories can be fleshed out with facts. Caustic crossfire eats away at the ideal of reasoned discourse like acid rain on a monument. It’s all too easy to shun long-form music under such a barrage. Pop song playlists and twitter feeds are really quite similar. The carefully calibrated length of a pop hit holds our attention for just a few minutes. The formulaic structure sets up expectations, only to unfailingly confirm them in the final chorus, perhaps with an all-caps key change. But the decision to attend a classical concert signals a willingness to risk hearing different musical ideas and becoming a participant in a longer, more nuanced exchange. For Princeton Pro Musica, preparing these works required discipline, teamwork, and imagination. Perhaps not every piece you hear today will be to your liking, and I don’t expect one concert to summon the magical joy of Beethoven’s and Bernstein’s dreams, but I hope that our gathering together to hear today’s “joyful noise” brings us all one step closer to that ideal.