“Arvo Pärt has opened a window into a world of spiritual ideals,” writes NPR Terrance McKnight in an announcement of Pärt’s newest CD, Cantique, to be released this month to coincide with the composer’s 75th birthday. You can preview Cantique on NPR, which is streaming the disc for free, in its entirety, till it releases on September 21, 2010.
SDG is joining the birthday celebration by co-sponsoring the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in Wales, which is offering the most extensive celebration of Pärt in the UK.
‘Cantique’ is challenging but merits careful and sustained listening to fully appreciate.
SDG’s FaceBook page provides updates from their festival, including Arvo Part highlights as the Festival opens Sunday.
Peter Bannister is a modern classic composer who takes theology seriously.
Concerning his recent oratorio Et iterum venturus est (And He shall come again), he says:
The historic creedal statement…reminds us that the Christian faith not only calls us to remember the Word’s becoming flesh but also to live in anticipation of Christ’s return. Et iterum venturus est is conceived as a work pulled in the “two directions” … focusing on Christ as both the promised Savior and Judge of Christian eschatology.
For a long time I have felt that during the liturgical season of Advent (which will be the context for the first performance of the piece in December 2008) a great deal of attention is paid to recalling the (not-so-burning) Babe of Bethlehem and relatively little to the Crucified and Risen Christ’s future coming in glory … ‘to judge the living and the dead’ in the words of the Creed.
The danger of this is that the awesome, unfathomable mystery that is the Incarnation becomes domesticated, dissociated from the transformational call to repentance and its implications for both our individual lives and God’s world.
While being careful to avoid any kind of speculation on the time-frame for the parousia, I intend to juxtapose scriptural texts regarding these two comings of Christ within one work in order to demonstrate their inseparability within the Biblical witness and…to interpret the past in the light of the future.
The video above (also viewable on YouTube here), Peter reflects on the challenges he faced writing Et iterum venturus est, discussing the intrinsic connection between music and spirituality and how he realized the necessity of linking profound theological reflection with challenging musical scores.
Click here to download an interview with Peter Bannister by Greg Wheatley that aired on Moody Radio.
I think this dumbing-down is a result of the American Christian community’s forgetting its high calling. We have become seduced by the television mentality of pleasing the multitudes and worrying about ratings. We want to have people in the pews and are willing to conform to this world rather than be transformed by the renewing of our minds and hearts.
I don’t mean to imply that a pipe organ and a great choir are better than a guitar and a praise leader. It goes far deeper than that. To mature both our minds and our hearts, we need more meat than milk. But in too many of our churches the world has crept in to the extent that one cannot tell the difference between a church and a conference center, between an altar and a stage, between sacred and secular music—all in the interest of attracting rather than challenging.
