St. Patrick’s Mass Away from Home: Eric Sweeney, Minimalism, and Migrancy

I  like the percussive nature of keyboards. A lot of the techniques I use are contrapuntal: the idea of phasing different rhythms against one another ... that’s what attracted me to some of the minimalist techniques—which of course are derived from eastern music, which is about as far away as you can get from Darmstadt. More recently, I’ve written a lot of organ music. I’ve written a lot of orchestral music as well, but I think a lot of composers find writing for orchestra fairly frustrating, in that orchestras are geared towards playing the standard repertoire. As a performer, I like to live with a work, let it sink in, and maybe in a month or six months time get round to performing it. Obviously, orchestras can’t work like that. But I don't think it does much for contemporary music when you’re sitting on the edge of your chair wondering, ‘Are they going to be able to play the notes?’ ”
  —  Eric Sweeney, interview with Jonathan Grimes, Contemporary Music Centre Ireland, 22-JUN-2004.

T  he term minimalism, as John McLachlan correctly points out, has become outmoded as a means of stylistic definition&$151;and if we think of composers as diverse as John Adams, Arvo Pärt, Michael Nyman and John Tavener it is difficult to see what, if any, shared language their music illustrates... Interestingly, minimalist music is far from easy to write, and eager composers with their fingers poised on the Copy/Paste commands of Finale or Sibelius will find it is a technique that makes surprising demands. Yes, of course it’s easy to produce limitless streams of musical sounds at the touch of a button, but, to make musical sense, to create pieces which are well structured, to engage and to sustain the listener’s interest—is as difficult, if not more difficult, than ever. Minimalism is no easy cop-out: it demands a rigorous command of the composer’s self-limited material as well as a radically different approach from the listener, who must be prepared to delve below the surface of ‘seemingly similar’ patterns of sound to find out what really is going on. The importance of minimalism is that it has radically altered the way we create, assess, and listen to music—as well as the fact that it has pointed to a new, liberating way forward for so many composers who had found themselves in a creative cul-de-sac.”
  —  Eric Sweeney, letter, JMI, October 2007.

Eric Sweeney’s Mass of St. Patrick, performed on 16-MAR, at Christ Church Cathedral in Waterford is an excellent illustration of new music in the context of old. Sweeney’s Mass of St Patrick is a ‘minimalist’ SATB setting of the Mass with organ accompaniment, commissioned by the Friends of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 2006.

In fact, there’s an inherent attraction to automatic compositional techniques and using structuring to constrain the range of possible choices for setting sacred texts like the Mass: cantus firmus melodies based on vowels in the text, transcendence beyond the literal text. Of course, all formal systems, whether they’re procedural or structural, are ways of externalizing some of the decision-making processes. The compositional forms—canon, fugue, rondo, sonata, cantata, etc.—are a framework for automating some decisions. They’re all generative forms. Sweeney’s choral writing here contains particularly beautiful ‘seeming similarities’.

But it’s clear that the Mass is also a vehicle for Sweeney’s personal world-view: the contemporary evolution of percussive cross-cultural dialogue in an Ireland that is engaged in the trans-national public sphere; the magisterial qualities in the organ part; a vision of a distinctly Irish utopia. In Sweeney’s erudite treatment, the traditional Roman Catholic liturgy harmonizes with new humanistic universalism; contingencies of dialogue, translation, and travel all participate in the construction of Irish national identity. The effect is reminiscent of Edward Said’s notion of the contrapuntal—‘contrapuntal reading’, ‘contrapuntal awareness’, the ‘contrapuntal exile’. (Sweeney himself has spent considerable time abroad: in North America he served variously as composer-in-residence at The Newport Festival, Rhode Island; at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland; at the University of Illinois; at Indiana State University in Terre Haute; and at the University of Portland, Oregon. Hardly ‘exiles’, these experiences. But they were valuable nonetheless in informing his sense of difference and alterity.) Now well-ensconced in Waterford, Sweeney and his minimalistic tendencies as a composer are fully ‘at-home’ in setting the Mass.

For those of us experiencing Sweeney’s compositions while far from our own homes, the effect is vivid, animating, heart-warming. The effect is one of austerity and migrancy, unexpectedly abated. Home, away from home.

[Eric is organist and choirmaster of Christ Church Cathedral in Waterford. A native Dubliner, Sweeney has made Waterford his home since 1981. He is chairman of the Music Department at Waterford Institute of Technology. Previously he was a member of the faculty of Dublin Institute of Technology and Trinity College. Before that, he was Choral Director at RTE from 1978-1981. Eric is a member of Aosdána, the academy of creative artists in Ireland.]

C omparison of chant texts with the original scriptural texts shows that in a great number of cases—as much as half of the chants of the Mass Proper—the original is altered in order to provide a suitable chant text. This is the phenomenon of ‘textual adjustment’. The discrepancies are not just a matter of conflicting versions of the biblical text but are clearly deliberate adaptations on the part of those fashioning the chant texts. The changes range from some that transform an entire text, to others involving a single word or two. The most frequently encountered major change is the omission of a segment of the original.”
  —  James McKinnon, The Advent Project: 7th-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper, p. 103.

• Eric Sweeney website
  
• Eric Sweeney at Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
  
• Dublin Choral Foundation. Sweeney: Circle of Light. (DCF, 2003.)
  
• Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford, Ireland
  
• Dublin Choral Foundation website
  
• Society for Musicology in Ireland (Aontas Ceoleolaíochta na Héireann)
  
• Adorno T. 'On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening,' in The Culture Industry, Bernstein J, ed. Taylor & Francis, 2007, pp. 29-60.
  
• Asgharzadeh A, Lawson E, Oka K, eds. Diasporic Ruptures: Globality, Migrancy, and Expressions of Identity, Vol. 1. Sense, 2007.
  
• Asgharzadeh A, Lawson E, Oka K, eds. Diasporic Ruptures: Globality, Migrancy, and Expressions of Identity, Vol. 2. Sense, 2007.
  
• Attali J. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Univ Minnesota, 1985.
  
• Chambers I. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge, 1994.
  
• Chenneviere R. The rise of the musical proletariat. Musical Quarterly 1920; 6: 500-9.
  
• Ferguson J. Utopias of the Classical World. Thames & Hudson, 1975.
  
• Griffin M. Utopian music and the problem of luxury. Utopian Studies 2005; 16:247-58.
  
• Hill J, Lennon C, eds. Luxury and Austerity. Univ College Dublin, 1999.
  
• McKinnon J. The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper. Univ California, 2000.
  
• Rees C. Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Longmans, 1996.
  
• Rusbridger A. What I did on my holidays: Piano camp is not for softies. The Guardian, 04-SEP-2006.
  
• Said E. Musical Elaborations. Columbia Univ, 1993.
  
• Said E. 'Yeats and Decolonization,' in Walder D, ed., Literature in the Modern World. Oxford Univ, 2004.
  
• Sweeney E. The meaning of minimalism. Journal of Music in Ireland 2007; 7(5).
  
• Winthrop R. Luxury and the Fine Arts (1859). Univ Michigan, 2006.