It was 15 years ago.
It was a Tuesday morning—a bright and beautiful late-summer morning.
I had had plans to get caught up on a bunch of work that day.
Then the news came in about the World Trade Center towers.
And then the Pentagon.
And then a 4th plane crashing in Central Pennsylvania.
Everything ground to a halt. To work seemed like sacrilege.
The last time we had seen anything of this magnitude was back on November 22, 1963.
The single-article issue of Time magazine appeared within the week following, showing us more of the horrors we hadn’t seen on television. The worst for me was the pictures of people jumping from the towers before the towers collapsed.
As it would turn out, the horrors we witnessed that day wound up providing at least a portion of the necessary focus, if subconsciously, for a commissioned work in the weeks and months that followed.
I’ll save the story of how that commission came about for another, more appropriate time. For now:
It was my first commission from anyone outside America: Rita Varonen, director of Chamber Choir Cantinovum based at the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut, Jyväskylä, Finland, commissioned my setting of Psalm 51 in Hebrew for SATB div. choir and 11 solo strings (or string orchestra).
I wrote the following program notes for the premiere, which took place on March 29 (Good Friday), 2002 (with additional notes/asides appearing here):
“As both a composer and conductor of music for choruses, my favorite sacred literature has always been the psalms, probably because they are, ultimately, the lyric poetry of the Bible. I have worked with many of the psalms over the years as both a church and synagogue musician, and it is always of interest to me how the same psalm text can have such different connotations for Jews and for Christians. Such a text is Psalm 51, being presented, perhaps for the 1st time in a long time (if ever), in both a Christian and Jewish context in the same program.
“While in the Christian church this psalm is central to the Good Friday liturgy, only 3 verses of this psalm are used in the entire Jewish liturgy, and only as isolated verses in other contexts—Psalm 51, in its entirety, never appears in Jewish liturgy.
“In setting this text musically, I was struck by how much of an ‘emotional roller-coaster’ this Psalm is: King David, in his remorse over his affair with Bathsheba (mentioned in the 1st two verses of the psalm in the Hebrew text—which, to my knowledge, has never been treated by any Christian setting) is by turns sorrowful, penitential, pleading, guilt-ridden, hopeful, and even off-topic. (Some hold that the final two verses were added later on by a different author.) So, while, for example, Gregorio Allegri’s setting (heard on the same program) simply uses two different musical formulas along with Gregorian psalm tones for his entire setting (hence why the young Mozart was able to write it down after hearing it only once—aside from the final phrase, the entire sequence of musical material is repeated five times), I felt obligated to reflect the ever-changing mood of the text in my setting.
The work is, ultimately, a suite of miniatures: atonal passages alternate with simple, tonal passages, often in stark contrast to each other in successive verses. I made use of one specific Jewish prayer mode, the s’licha (penitential) mode/melody, introduced at the beginning by the tenors and basses in canon, and which also occurs in its most direct form in the verse Al tashlicheini mil’fanecha (“Cast me not away from Your presence.”) Also appearing as the setting for the final verse of Psalm 51 proper is the melody for a litany of pleas for help and deliverance drawn which occurs in both the S’lichot service (a pre-High Holy Days service held either at midnight or at dawn that is a penitential “warm-up” for that season) and the Kol Nidrei service for Yom Kippur.
“Another unifying element consists of the single, loud pizzicato notes that appear in unexpected places—musical ‘pangs of conscience’ (which also are designed to assist the choir in a number of their entrances!).
“One other element that may be of interest in this setting is that, because the psalm ends rather inconclusively (at least from a musico-dramatic standpoint), it seemed to me that something needed to follow the final verses, and, unlike Christian composers, I could not simply add a Gloria Patri as an ending! However, I discovered through some research that there are three verses from elsewhere in the psalms that are to be read when one concludes a reading of the entire book of Psalms. They are: Psalm 14:7 (“Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When the LORD brings back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.”); Psalm 37:39 (“But the salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; He is their strength in time of trouble.”); and 40 (“And the LORD helps them, and delivers them; He delivers them from the wicked, and saves them, because they have taken refuge in Him.”) These three verses represented exactly the kind of concluding text that I felt the piece needed, and, therefore, constitute the extended conclusion of the work.
“Finally, as I look back over the creation of this work, I know that I had no specific, conscious thoughts about the events of September 11, 2001 during the actual compositional process. Yet, in retrospect, I am certain that those horrific events and their aftermath must have colored my thinking—ultimately, how could they not? Therefore, whatever else its content may reflect, this work also stands as my own small and entirely personal response as a human being and an artist to those horrors.
“I wish to thank Pamela Hitchcock for her invaluable and essential assistance with the Hebrew text, providing interlinear Hebrew-English translations for me, and providing pronunciation models for Chamber Choir Cantinovum; Juha and Elana Hollo for providing interlinear Hebrew-Finnish translations from the Hebrew-English text, and, finally, Rita Varonen and Chamber Choir Cantinovum for asking me to write this work, and for being fearless and willing to present its world premiere this evening.”
While Psalm 51 has yet to be performed here in the US, it was heard—or, more accurately, broadcast—here on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. It was selected to be aired during a 24-hour live broadcast entitled WE REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11 on WPRB 103 FM (Princeton, New Jersey) at around 4 PM on Sunday, September 11, 2011, hosted by Marvin Rosen (who hosted for the full 24 hours straight!).
I wrote the following abbreviated notes on the piece for a press release for the broadcast:
“The work, which may be the first-ever setting of the complete text of Psalm 51 in Hebrew, was commissioned by Rita Varonen and the Chamber Choir Cantinovum of the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut (Jyväskylä, Finland) and premiered there under Rita Varonen's direction March 29 (Good Friday), 2002. It was subsequently performed there on September 15, 2002 for a 9/11 memorial service. (Rita told me that that performance was better than the premiere; but, alas, that performance wasn’t recorded.) The broadcast will be of a recording of the world premiere performance.
“Although the work was not written specifically in response to 9/11, that disaster's aftermath and effects on the US and the world significantly affected the composition of the work. Psalm 51 is, perhaps, one of the most anguished pleas for forgiveness and mercy in all the Bible, and the focus in relation to 9/11 is one of introspection, as in: How did my action or inaction contribute to this catastrophic event? How might I, as an individual, have acted differently before it happened? And how might I act differently to help prevent something like this from happening again?”
My initial statement in the abbreviated notes still astounds me. Surely I’m not the first person to have set the entire psalm to music in Hebrew; let alone with the extra three verses added...
But that’s not the most important question. Not at all.
Those other questions remain open. It all has to do with how we choose to relate to the rest of the world, as individuals and as a larger society.
Lest anyone misread the second paragraph of my amplified notes: I have no illusion that I bear any responsibility for what happened, nor that anything I, alone, could have done would have made any difference.
But humanity, collectively, seems to have a great deal of difficulty looking past surface details to address the root causes of what happens in this world—in many, many areas, not merely social or political. Should we ever learn, collectively, to address those root causes (for both good and bad things that happen), I believe this shall be the ultimate source of human redemption.
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