I have managed to treat my many new subscribers with a long dose of silence, and an explanation is in due order before I resume my regular spate of writings and postings.
To begin with, it has been an astoundingly busy and fruitful time for me, but being that I am also a composer and writer who holds down a day job as a professor — and has a family to care for — sometimes a limit is reached on how much I can produce. As such, the many articles I have sketched remained in broken and incomplete form as pressing deadlines loomed. But in this space I instead completed work on two of the largest musical projects of my career so far, works whose tone and tenor went to the very soul of why I became a composer to begin with.
The first involved composing and producing most of the music for the third and final installment of the Mass of the Ages trilogy. As the first two parts have been viewed millions of times, this has been an absolute thrill and privilege to work on, and represents work I truly believe in on a personal level. As a generally traditional composer, I should point out that film work demands something different from us: we are not only asked to compose (and recompose, and often recompose a few more times) the music for specific scenes in a film, but also to provide the fully produced audio tracks as well. A traditional composer creates his score and depends on his performers to realize the rest, while a film composer in modern times — and outside of big-budget features — also becomes a one-stop shop as an orchestrator, performer, and audio producer. It’s an incredibly taxing process which, despite the joy and vitality of this particular project (something I have elsewhere claimed to be one of the most important films being made in the entire world, given that Lex Orandi/Lex Credendi/Lex Vivendi holds true always and is always in need of revivification), became a sort of mini Golgotha for me as we reached the end. Sometimes it is astounding how doing exactly what you always wished you could do professionally absolutely drains you in the process.
Part 3 of Mass of the Ages — Guardians of Tradition — is set to premiere at the historic Pickwick Theater in Chicago on March 9th, the details of which I will share as they finish coming together. After that, the general global youtube premiere will take place, while individual showings can be arranged with the filmmaking team. I invite you to visit the official project website for more information! We may do an separate soundtrack release as well, but many details have to be worked out first.
As I was about halfway through Mass of the Ages, I had the privilege of being granted an academic sabbatical. While I had planned on using this time to work on my long dormant symphony, I was approached by the directorship of the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard - the vibrant young classical music organization in my mother’s hometown in Poland - to begin working on a long-term recording project. They asked for a setting of The Seven Last Words of Christ for solo bass-baritone voice, string orchestra, percussion, and clarinet, and I delivered the final score and parts this morning. The work is slated to be recorded and premiered the weekend of March 15th in Stargard, Poland, and it goes without saying that I am simultaneously excited and terrified by the experience to come. As these projects coincided so prominently in my life, I have (with the effective permission of the relevant parties involved) dropped a little compositional Easter Egg between these two projects: a prominent musical theme shared briefly in both scores; I do wonder if anyone will ever pick it out…
As a preview to this performance as well as the astounding artistic progress this group has been able to make in only five short years of existence, here is the recording which convinced me to work with them: their rendition of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater:
Finally, you may recall that last August I wrote about the impending premiere of a very personal work to me in the form of my Ave Maris Stella for His Majesty’s Men (for who I remain a composer-in-residence.) A dear friend of mine surprised me after the premiere when he said that he heard a music which presaged a brighter time in the future, when the present darkness will pass into a new time of Beauty and Love: a resurgent and eschatologically oriented Christian society. I had a hard time believing it, but then I was approached by one of America’s most famous (unjustly) cancelled Priests (who must remain nameless), who also shared deep enthusiasm along a similar line. As a composer I had never thought of my work being able to point in such a direction; now I can think of doing nothing else. (As if we don’t put enough pressure on ourselves to begin with…) Whatever you yourself may think of it, I hope the work brings you hope and joy…