Hello again on this Good Friday, friends:
Not even 24 hours after writing my last email newsletter to you (...and turns out I never hit "send"? You can read it here: Passacaglia of the Passion) I found myself on the organ bench playing the Crucifixus from Bach's B minor Mass. And I thought to myself, "is this not a passacaglia?"
And in truth, it is. But it's not entirely like the other Passacaglias I was thinking about last week.
Not even 24 hours after writing my last email newsletter to you (...and turns out I never hit "send"? You can read it here: Passacaglia of the Passion) I found myself on the organ bench playing the Crucifixus from Bach's B minor Mass. And I thought to myself, "is this not a passacaglia?"
And in truth, it is. But it's not entirely like the other Passacaglias I was thinking about last week.
- It's choral, and therefore texted. It's literally about the Crucifixion
- But is it not interesting that Bach chose this very musical form for this movement of his B minor Mass?
- And there's something more to this theme. It's a passus duriusculus (literally a "difficult passage"). The chromatic filling in of a perfect fourth is something understood in Baroque rhetoric as representing suffering and lament. Bach might have even referred to this as a lamento bass line.
What else?
In this Holy Week, I am contemplating, as I always do, music that has just right quality for these sacred days. But I'm thinking more and more that it's a kind of meeting halfway; yes, the music has to have a seriousness to it, but it's also made more intense by it being sung/played during this time.
That's where the rubber hits the road for this thing called church music, I guess.
Here are just a couple of the things I encountered that really take on greater intensity during Holy Week:
- The Howells Westminster Service sung at Palm Sunday Evensong at St. Thomas, New York
- The Leighton Second Service sung at Palm Sunday Evensong at Duke University Chapel
- Our own singing of the Ubi caritas by Lennox Berkeley during the Foot Washing at last night's Maundy Thursday service.
Wishing you a blessed Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter,
-David