2012

Muñiz composes a 21st-century ‘Stabat Mater’

SOUTH BEND — Soon after Jorge Muñiz moved to South Bend, he and Wishart Bell developed the sort of friendship that involves meeting for coffee several times a year.

At one of those coffee get-togethers last year, Bell mentioned that Musical Arts Indiana, the choral and orchestra organization he founded in 1993 as the Vesper Chorale and continues to oversee as its artistic director, wanted to commission a new work from a local composer.

A composer and professor of music at Indiana University South Bend, Muñiz responded the way Bell seemingly hoped he would: Yes, he had a piece that hadn’t yet been performed and that he could revise to fit the instrumentation and size of Musical Arts’ orchestra.

And now, on March 25, the Vesper Chorale and Vesper Chamber Orchestra will premiere Muñiz’s “Stabat Mater” at St. Matthew Cathedral, as the centerpiece of a program that also includes works by Bach, Rachmaninoff and Morten Lauridsen.

Possibly written by Pope Innocent III, the 13th-century “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” poem uses the perspective of a first-person observer to describe Mary’s grief as she watches Christ die on the cross and then receive his body.

Dozens of other composers have set the “Stabat Mater” to music, including, most famously, Haydn, Pergolesi and Dvorák — Muñiz, in fact, will conduct a performance by IUSB and South Bend area high school students of Pergolesi’s on April 1 at Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church as a benefit with the Rotary Club to raise money for polio care.

But, Bell says, Muñiz’s “Stabat Mater” adds new dimensions to the tradition that make it a relevant contribution to the setting of the poem.

“Simply put, it’s in 21st-century musical language,” he says. “Each of those other composers wrote to the best of their ability to capture the text in the musical language of their time, and Jorge’s does the same thing.”

By describing it as a 21st-century work, however, Bell doesn’t mean Muñiz’s composition is “experimental,” but it is “a very persuasive musical language” that he continues to develop as his own.

“One of his stylistic traits is to start with a thin texture and expand from it,” Bell says. “He does that several times in this piece. The ‘Stabat Mater’ starts and (the first theme) repeats and repeats and repeats as voices are piled onto the sound.”

The work, Bell says, also uses a complicated rhythmic structure.

“He has the strings in some places playing on the second 16th note,” he says. “It’s syncopation. It’s another way he piles on sound. He’ll have somebody playing on the downbeat and someone else on the second 16th note. … He creates this piling of sound, and it’s all descriptive of the pain of the Crucifixion.”

A defining moment

Muñiz wrote the “Stabat Mater” in 2001 and he discussed a possible premiere of it with an ensemble in his native Spain, but nothing materialized from it.

For Musical Arts’ premiere, he scaled down the orchestration to fit the Vesper Chamber Orchestra’s size, and he now sees this version as the “first and original” score.

“I don’t consider this a change I did for this concert,” he says. “I think it works better now. Because the orchestra is simpler, it made me think more about the harmonic language. This has become the ‘Stabat Mater’ for me.”

The piece has also become a defining moment for him, the first to point to the direction he has since taken as a composer with an emphasis on large-scale and faith-based works. The most prominent of those so far has been his “Requiem for the Innocent,” a work Muñiz composed in response to terrorism in general and the Sept. 11, 2001,al-Qaidaattacks on the United States in particular that the South Bend Symphony Orchestra premiered in September 2010. In it, he used Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious texts in an effort to represent the common tenets of the three major monotheistic religions and to provide a basis for hope for a peaceful future.

“(The ‘Stabat Mater’) helped me to define better my compositional direction in the sense of bringing social issues — terrorism in the case of the Requiem, loss in this case — to bring that within a faith perspective,” he says, “but that it’s more than that (one religion) and will reach other audiences. … They have a religious setting, they both use classical texts, one from the Requiem Mass and in this case the ‘Stabat Mater’ text. They both have become texts for Christians and Catholics, specifically, but like the ‘Requiem,’ I wanted a piece that would go beyond the religious and be transcendental.”

Compassion, empathy and reflection

“His thematic structures are designed to describe the text, to describe the emotion of the text,” Bell says about the “Stabat Mater.” “It’s a pretty stark text. There’s real pain in this text, and that gets into the music.”

With such lines as, “Who is the person who would not weep seeing the Mother of Christ in such agony?” Muñiz says, the “Stabat Mater” conveys compassion and empathy.

“It’s us humans, humanity, experiencing that image of the mother and her son Jesus on her arms,” he says. “It’s that image that us, humanity, watches and how we react to it. We react to it with compassion and grief. … It experiences what she saw when her son was dying, the affliction he felt. The whole poem goes through the different steps in her grief. That’s what makes it so powerful to me, that empathy.”

But with lines such as, “Lest I burn, set afire by flames, Virgin, may I be defended by you, on the Day of Judgment,” Muñiz says, it also conveys contrition.

“An important component is us reflecting on ourselves in what we have done and what we have failed to do,” he says. “It’s about acknowledging our own sins, our own mistakes, our own shortcomings. I think that sort of reflection is the natural next step after empathy and sorrow.”

In addition to his use of a “21st-century musical language,” Muñiz puts his own stamp on the “Stabat Mater” by incorporating into the composition the Spanish text from one of the early- and mid-20th-century Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s “Sonnets of Death” poems as the part sung by the contralto soloist.

“I wanted to include a poem that’s closer to our time that reflects on any mother that has lost a child,” Muñiz says. “I think she really captured that tragedy in words that are very powerful, very raw in very strong words. I think this piece goes between the human and the transcendental.”

In the first-person poem, a mother bewails the death of her son and questions God as to the justness of his death.

The two works, the “Stabat Mater” poem and Mistral’s poem, Bell says, make for a complementary contrast in the work.

“It’s the poet describing the death of a loved one and how unfair it is,” he says. “That sense of loss and grief and even anger goes wonderfully alongside the text of the ‘Stabat Mater.’ In the case of the ‘Stabat Mater,’ it’s somebody observing this scene. It’s not Mary. The poet is speaking her own grief, whereas the narrator is describing Mary’s grief.”

The choir represents humanity, Muñiz says, while the orchestra represents Christ and the deceased son, and the contralto represents the grieving mother of Mistral’s poem.

“This is almost like an opera, because you can imagine the moment the son dies in the hands of Mary and her cry,” he says. “This (first Mistral) stanza, she cries, ‘Why, why did these hands take you from me?’ … I think when the audience listens to the piece, they’re going to hear a lot of conflict and drama. The text does explore different sides of grief. Some (stanzas) will be more contemplative, some are very hard and personal.”

2008

New classical music to shake things up

SOUTH BEND — The piano will be loaded with pingpong balls, the flute will imitate humpback whale songs, and the ghosts of Bach, Brahms and Strauss will be invoked Thursday at Indiana University South Bend.

Suffice it to say the IU South Bend New Music Ensemble’s debut concert won’t be the same old song for classical music performances in the area.

Founder Jorge Muñiz believes the New Music Ensemble will fill an open niche in area concert programming — as well as serve his educational goals as an assistant professor of composition and theory at IUSB, where he has taught since August 2006.

“There’s a pocket there that I think we can cover,” he says. “I looked at the repertoire that is offered in different concerts around town, and I think we can expand it.”

The ensemble, which is offered as a course at IUSB, will give one concert each semester and will occasionally feature music from the first half of the 20th century but will focus primarily on the latter half of the century to the present. For Thursday’s concert, performers will include a cellist, violinist, flutist, violist and three pianists, including Muñiz and his wife, Jennifer, an adjunct assistant professor of music at IUSB, executive director of the South Bend Youth Symphonies and member of the University of Notre Dame’s music faculty.

Titled “American Revolutions: 1950-1970,” Thursday’s concert’s program includes Bohuslav Martinu’s Sonata No. 1 for Viola and Piano, John Cage’s Six Melodies for Violin and Piano, George Rochberg’s “Nach Bach,” George Crumb’s “Vox Ballenae,” and works by two IUSB composition students, Richard Threet’s “Vita Movendis” and Michael Nolan’s “Transparency on Cello Sonata No. 1 by Johannes Brahms.”

“We’ll try to use this music in a cultural way and in an educational way,” Muñiz says. “Regarding the concert, hopefully, it will be interesting for the audience, but they should expect to come out of the concert with a new perspective and new appreciation for this music. That’s my goal.”

He has other goals for the New Music Ensemble, too.

According to his program notes, Muñiz founded the New Music Ensemble to promote new music and create new audiences, to provide the student performers with the practice and tools to perform the most current music, and to provide student composers with the opportunity for their works to be performed.

“It is very important to have a platform for that … to try out things,” he says about programming students’ works. “These are works that may be only 10 bars, but we can try things and change things as we see necessary.”

Muñiz practices what he teaches.

Born in Switzerland in 1974 and raised in Spain, Muñiz earned his master’s degree in composition from Carnegie Mellon University and his doctorate in composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where he then taught for four years after graduating.

He currently is at work on the opera “Germinal,” based on the novel by Émile Zola and commissioned by the Opera Festival of Oviedo, Spain. Also, this month alone, two of his works will receive their premiere performances: On March 4, the Spanish String Quartet gave his Fourth String Quartet its premiere at the XVII Festival Internacional de Primavera in Salamanca, and on March 29, his “Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah” for Soprano and String Quartet will receive its premiere at the College Music Society, Great Lakes Chapter conference at Illinois State University in a performance by Alicia Purcell, lecturer in voice at IUSB, and the Avalon String Quartet, the former quartet-in-residence at IUSB.

As a pianist, he released the CD “Cantos del Emigrante” in 2007 with Spanish tenor Joaquín Pixán. With his compositions, Muñiz says, he seeks most to “communicate” with an audience, although without rejecting any appropriate styles or techniques for a given piece.

“I believe it is very important to write music that will get to an audience,” he says. “I have no problem using many different techniques while maintaining my own voice. … I think the biggest problem we have is a lack of exposure and understanding. It’s just another technique. The purpose of the technique is to serve the piece.”

That stands in contrast to the attitude of many composers from the 1950s to the 1970s, which, Muñiz says, alienated audiences with their experimentation.

“During the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, I think, there was a movement of composers moving away from the wider audience and to select groups,” he says. “Many concerts were sometimes looking forward to outrage the audience and move away from them. That isn’t the case now, and there is a lot of wonderful music from that time. If we present it well, hopefully, we will create an audience for this music.”

To that end, Muñiz will introduce each work before it is performed.

“I understand that more recent music, some music, needs to be explained to the audience,” he says. “We also need to talk about the music, explain the music to the audience, so that their experience is more fruitful. … (I will) just give a few pointers so the audience can look for different aspects in a piece and follow it from there.”

Written in 1950, Cage’s “Six Melodies,” Muñiz says, opened doors for the minimalists of the ’60s.

“It’s a new direction that Cage is taking regarding time and form,” he says. “He’s experimenting with freezing sonorities, so there’s no real development to the piece. …There are changes, but the changes happen in a very small way.”

He included Martinu’s Sonata for Viola and Piano on the concert’s all-American program, Muñiz says, because the Czech composer immigrated to the United States in 1941.

“He does bring something interesting, to me, which is linking the past traditions — I hear Brahms in this sonata — into a new language, a new voice in the 20th century,” he says about the piece and adds that he can hear its influence in Rochberg’s “Nach Bach.” “Rochberg is using a partita by Bach in direct quotations, but they are transformed and seen from a new angle.”

Crumb’s “Vox Ballenae” was inspired by recordings of humpback whales and calls for the stage to be bathed in deep blue light.

“George Crumb, in the ’60s, the ’70s, also brings elements from the past, but in this piece, he quotes different elements — ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ — but in this piece, he brought a new search for color in the way you play inside the piano,” Muñiz says. “The flute also uses new techniques, as does the cello. … It’s a call to ecology and nature, but to me, the most important thing, and I think it has influenced composers immeasurably, is this search for new color.”

Nolan’s “Transparency” involves indirect quotations from Brahm’s Cello Sonata No. 1.

“The approach was more of having listened to the cello sonata (and asking), what themes are sort of floating around in your mind a couple of hours later?” he says. “I actually wrote the context, outlined the piece and had the structure and had a good deal of what was going on before I did much quotation.”

Muñiz, Threet says, wanted him to get “out of my comfort zone, tonal music, to explore other types of music so that I can have a more contemporary vocabulary.”

Inspired by the birth of Jorge and Jennifer Muñiz’s first child, “Vita Movendis” is a programmatic experimental work that depicts life from birth to adulthood to old age.

“It was challenging because I thought first and foremost I needed something that resembled a complete arc rather than a series of six unrelated movements and to do something that was different but still have it linked together,” Threet says. “It was more exploratory, and the abstract part of the brain was happy with this. Sitting down at the piano, the only rule is that you can’t play it traditionally, with your fingers on the keyboard, and you’re finding all the other ways to make music.”

As a result, the pianists strum the strings of the piano in the first movement and use mallets in the second movement, while the fourth movement makes use of marbles and pingpong balls applied to the strings. All of the movements include specific instructions for the lighting and sound technicians, when available.

Threet, however, also makes use of familiar elements: the pentatonic scale to represent mother and child, a tango to represent adulthood.

“The final movement borrows material from several other movements,” he says. “One of the players puts chains on top of the strings, and that changes the nature of what is heard. It gives a brittle and even piercing sound, which is part of old age. … Parts of this are ‘forgotten’ or ‘mis-remembered.’ It’s all written out, but they can eliminate notes or be late or early. It talks about memory and how it can fail us.”

For “Vita Movendis,” Muñiz challenged Threet to employ techniques he hadn’t before.

“It’s a difficult balance to give them the freedom they need to compose the projects they’re really passionate about while at the same time making sure that if they become too comfortable with a particular style, they should question that,” Muñiz says.

“As a creative artist, I think it’s important also to keep advancing and looking forward to the possibilities in your voice. … If something gets too comfortable, something probably needs to be learned.”