Fascinating article in the Times

[rhu]

Today's NYT Arts & Leisure section has a fascinating article (reg. req.) about Chanticleer's soon-to-be-premiered new work, And On Earth, Peace: A Chanticleer Mass.

The gist of it is that they commissionsed five composers from different faith traidtions to write a piece inspired by each of the five sections of the Ordinary of the Mass. For example, the Jewish composer who was commissioned to write the Credo set the text of the Rambam's thirteen principles of faith, each of which begins Ani Ma'amin (= "I believe" = "Credo")

Comments

[cellio]

Oh, that sounds very neat! Thanks for pointing this out.

Once upon a time, before I was Jewish, I wanted to compose the ordinary for a mass -- not because of the religion, but because I'm into medieval and renaissance music and all the big-name composers did this, so I wanted to try too. As it turned out, I couldn't bring myself to do the heavy-duty Jesus stuff (I guess my subconscious knew before I did :-) ), so the only part I did was the Sanctus. Which I think turned out to be pretty spiffy (our SCA choir did it), but it would be pretty hard to morph it into the Kedusha on which the Christians presumably based it. So now, alas, I have no place where I can use this piece. (I wouldn't be comfortable with having it be used to enhance Christian worship.)

Something like this, though -- the "ordinary" in name or broad theme only -- would be quite spiffy. It'd be really neat to hear what the other faiths did with their parts.