Shining Light: The Music of Morten Lauridsen

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, at that time of great tragedy for the people of the United States of America, the Los Angeles Classical Radio Station KUSC-FM played over the air the Lux Aeterna by Morten Lauridsen, who is America’s leading contemporary composer of choral works. This was an inspired choice and it is an example of the phenomenon that certain really effective musical compositions can answer to a people’s deepest needs at times of crisis and extremity.

Only a few years earlier, Sir John Tavener’s Song for Athene thus answered at the funeral service in Westminster Abbey for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Other examples include Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco in the context of Italy in the late nineteenth century; Sibelius’s Finlandia chorus sung in hymn form; and one of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march tunes, as adapted to “Land of Hope and Glory”, despite his later reservations. At a more modest and solemn level of musicianship, there is Sir John Arkwright’s hymn “O Valiant Hearts” (1919) as set by Rev. Dr Charles Harris. Other notable examples include Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861) set to a traditional tune collected and popularised by William Steffe in 1856 (and otherwise sung earlier as “John Brown’s Body”).

It is a mark of truly great musicianship to produce something that is not only fine in itself, but also is so in touch with its own times that it can have such an influence and resonance with the nation from which it has sprung. This essay considers the life and choral works of Morten Lauridsen, who is as yet not so well known in Australia, outside choral music circles, but whose music will, I believe, increasingly strike a chord with us, as it has with the peoples of the United States of America and Europe.

Morten Lauridsen was born in 1943 at Colfax in the State of Washington and studied at Whitman College and the University of Southern California, where he sang in a choral group and turned to the formal study of music under Halsey Stevens and in particular the composition of choral works and art songs. He was appointed to the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at USC in 1967, where he has taught ever since and succeeded to Halsey Stevens’s chair.

He had some early choral works published in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s he had moved to settings of poems by Robert Graves in Mid-Winter Songs (1980) and Madrigali: Six “Firesongs” on Italian Renaissance Poems (1987). In 1993 came Les Chansons des Roses, settings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1994 Lauridsen published what has become perhaps his most acclaimed work, O Magnum Mysterium, a superb setting of the famous two lines of text relating to the Incarnation and which is now performed all over the world. In 1997, Lauridsen’s work Lux Aeterna received its premiere performance by the Los Angeles Master Chorale led by the great authority on chant, the late Paul Salamunovich. It was momentously received and the Chorale’s recording under Salamunovich in 1998 was then nominated for a Grammy Award.

In 2005, Lauridsen published Nocturnes, a group of three songs, settings of poems by Rilke (“Sa Nuit d’Été”), Pablo Neruda (“Soneto de la Noche”) and James Agee (“Sure on This Shining Night”). In 2008, he added a fourth song to this group, setting Rilke’s “Epilogue: Voici le Soir”. The settings of the words of Neruda and Agee have become Lauridsen’s most popularly performed choral works and, with the current revival of choral music in the United States, are sung by professional choirs and many good collegiate and university choirs, both there and internationally. Indeed, Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium has been performed in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.

Lauridsen has received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the University of Aberdeen, where O Magnum Mysterium was then performed and his name was entered in the university’s historic roll of musical honorands, along with those of Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Dame Joan Sutherland. In 2007, Lauridsen received the United States National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in a ceremony at the White House.

Lauridsen is currently one of America’s most performed composers and his works have been given in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Vatican, Sydney Opera House and Westminster Abbey. Scores of his Dirait-On, O Magnum Mysterium and the O Nata Lux from Lux Aeterna have become all-time best-sellers among the octavos published by the Theodore Presser Company, which has traded in music scores since 1783.

Lauridsen has received over 400 commissions and is frequently a guest lecturer in music and composition and artist/composer-in-residence in universities, colleges and conservatoria worldwide. In addition to the Sydney Opera House, his Lux Aeterna has been performed at Canberra in 2007, at St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane in 2014, by the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra in its 2012-13 concerts and also in St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Perth.

For all of this great achievement, which includes several works which are of such beauty and fine construction that they are likely to remain in the choral repertoire of the world for centuries to come, Lauridsen’s work gets minimal notice by what is known in the USA as the East Coast musical establishment. It is all rather like the phenomenon of those English critics who ignored Elgar’s work for years and those “Modernist” others who disparaged it in the decades immediately after his death. This usual “tactic of silence” will be familiar to the readers of Quadrant. Many highly knowledgeable people have testified to the quality, beauty and appeal of Lauridsen’s works; but, save for some reviews that are limited and grudging, if not dismissive, he does not receive the proper attention of the musical “establishment”. This establishment is, of course, in so many ways, in fact an “anti-establishment” or fancies itself one—but it is an establishment and an obstacle nevertheless, just as Elgar encountered from a different direction, in the England of the 1890s. But, as Dame Nellie Melba once said of the critics: “They say—What say they?—Let them say!” Critics come and go—yet good composers and performers will endure. And endurance and perseverance have been conspicuous in Lauridsen’s career.

This is one of the points which are so very well brought out in Michael Stillwater’s award-winning documentary film Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012) which is now available on DVD. Composer documentaries come in various forms and are of varying quality. Among the remarkable ones in recent decades was Tony Palmer’s William Walton: At the Haunted End of the Day (1981) and much earlier, Elgar made by Ken Russell and Huw Weldon in 1962 for the BBC’s Monitor program.

In some respects Shining Night performs a similar task in respect of Lauridsen and his works, with the difference that he himself appears in it. The composer is seen first at his summer home on Waldron Island in Washington State, where he has composed major works and which has been his retreat and along with the inspiration of the island’s natural beauties, also his creative powerhouse, for many decades now. He emerges as a very modest soul, completely dedicated to his teaching and composing work, and as one of those composers highly attuned indeed to words and with an uncanny ability to appreciate and set the essence of both traditional texts and modern or contemporary poetry.

Lauridsen comes of Danish-American ancestry and says he identifies strongly with the sea and seafaring and with remote, wild and quiet places. After his college years and before university studies, he worked for a time as a firewatcher on observation towers amongst the scenic wonders of the forests and mountains of Washington State. He then turned to studying music at USC, where Halsey Stevens accepted him on a conditional basis, as he as yet lacked a portfolio. He worked hard to familiarise himself with instruments, musical principles and practice and its literature and related texts. His earliest published pieces date from the mid-1960s, for example, A Backyard Universe. There is something in Morten Lauridsen which, despite obvious differences, brings to my mind our Australian poet Les Murray—namely, a homespun quality that yet embraces the universal themes, together with an acutely sensitive and lyrical ear for words and for their meanings and evocations.

For example, in Shining Night, Lauridsen comments as to the effect upon him of the two short sentences of Latin text which he set in O Magnum Mysterium, that venerable responsorial chant in the Matins of Christmas:

O magnum mysterium,

et admirabile sacramentum,

ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,

jacentem in praesepio!

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera

meruerunt portare

Dominum Christum.

Alleluia.

O great mystery,

and wonderful sacrament,

that animals should see the new-born Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the Virgin whose womb

was worthy to bear

Christ the Lord.

Alleluia!

His setting of this text is nothing short of inspired. Indeed, both hearers and performers have commented on the fact that in this, as in other pieces by Lauridsen, there is, in addition to an elegiac and meditative mood, a quality or pattern of natural respiration which pulses and balms the soul. In the film, it is significant that accompanying Lauridsen’s comments on this traditional text, so often set by composers of church music, is an image of The Madonna of the Rose Bower, that magnificent picture by Stefan Lochner now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which depicts the Virgin Mary enthroned in a medieval hortus conclusus, holding the Christ child, and wearing a unicorn jewel pendant.

Lux Aeterna is explained by Lauridsen as a work composed as his mother was dying and it is, as its name implies, a tribute to the eternal light which is invoked in the traditional words of the Requiem Mass. However, the O Nata Lux at the heart of this work, “a serene invocation of heavenly light … [is] drawn not from the liturgy of the Requiem Mass, but rather from a hymn sung during the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, this a cappella excerpt from Lux Aeterna is a refulgent portrait of spiritual repose”.[1] It is not quite clear what Lauridsen’s own religious roots were, but he expressly acknowledges such roots in his discussions of religious texts. At the same time he says one does not need to be a “church-goin’” person to appreciate the significance of the invocation of the illumination of light in the natural world, which also is a prefiguring of such eternal light. There is in Lauridsen’s major works, such as the O Nata Lux in Lux Aeterna, a wistful and elegiac quality, which can remind one of the idea of transience evoked by Erwin Panofsky in his famous essay “Et Ego in Arcadia: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau”.[2]

True though it is that Lauridsen’s work often expresses a sense of profound loss, it is also extremely uplifting in its nature as elegy. For example, in 2012, Lauridsen set to music the prominent American poet and man of letters Dana Gioia’s “Prayer”, written in memory of Gioia’s late infant son Michael, who was a victim of SIDS. Here, the setting is entirely original and deeply moving, and the work is cognate with such great tributes as Herbert Howells’s Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing (1963) which links the memory of President J.F. Kennedy with that of the death from polio in 1935 of Howells’s nine-year-old son, also named Michael. Yet, even Lauridsen’s elegiac tone is not negative; it is profoundly uplifting and most affecting. The Lux Aeterna does indeed evoke the preternatural light that is indicated, or is suggested, in the ordinary world—and one thinks of the Urlicht in Mahler’s Second Symphony—but the tragic is yet transcended—as it is in Gioia’s poem—even if not overcome.

Space here does not permit of discussion or notice of all of Lauridsen’s many works, but one cannot write of him without some comment on those two very appealing, and hence very popular and much-loved, songs, Soneta de la Noche and Sure on This Shining Night. To start with the second, James Agee’s poem is, as Lauridsen has said, “very pantheistic” in its invocation of the natural world around us; and like many of Lauridsen’s best works, this has a musical structure and a development which tend to suggest that it has always existed. Here, one thinks of Goethe in his celebrated encounter with the stone: “What are You doing here?” Yet, it is certainly not so much like what some have called Beethoven’s “rock-like inevitability”, as much as a thing which coheres because it appears to grow and develop almost as if out of itself. It is no wonder that this is now perhaps the most frequently sung of all the works of Morten Lauridsen, and it enjoys particular favour on the collegiate and university choral circuits. Lauridsen’s setting of Neruda’s “Soneta de la Noche” has some relation to Sure on This Shining Night, only it is in a much more elegiac vein. As Lauridsen himself takes us over its lines in the film Shining Night, it is clear that he was here again moved by deep private loss, to evoke and to enshrine the memory of one loved and cherished beyond all words.

However, gentle reader, do not take it just from me. Hear what commentators such as Byron Adams and other American reviewers have said of Lauridsen and his works. Adams first:

Morten Lauridsen is America’s pre-eminent composer of choral music, a creator whose music has entered into the hearts of countless singers, performers and audiences. He has reached beyond the borders of his native land to an international audience. Lauridsen … is a meticulous craftsman, whose work radiates the uncanny quality of art that has always seemed to exist in its own perfection. He is a composer whose primary emphasis is upon the voice: Lauridsen writes long, arching and highly expressive lines. He has made a close and profitable study of vocal music from all historical periods, including plainchant, Renaissance polyphony, and classical art song.

In particular, Lauridsen has studied the choral music of the High Renaissance, and this study has had a decided influence on the development of his inimitable sound. From the Renaissance composers such as Marenzio and Monteverdi, Lauridsen has assimilated such techniques as canon, flexible imitation, and, in particular, a deeply sensitive response to textual images. These influences never result in pastiche, however, but are assimilated into a personal idiom that is simultaneously timeless and contemporary. His music is direct and clear, lively and pensive, emotional but disciplined. Lauridsen is emphatically a composer of the present day who takes his technical mastery from a searching investigation of the past.[3]

So here is a master choral composer.

In his article “The Best Composer You’ve Never Heard Of”, Wall Street Journal reviewer Terry Teachout observed:

It’s been a long time since an American classical composer became famous, much less popular. Philip Glass was probably the last one whose name would be passably well known to the public at large, and even Mr Glass isn’t nearly as famous as Aaron Copland. That says a lot about the marginal place of high culture in America—none of it good.

So who ought to be famous? Or, to put it another way, who’s writing classical music these days that’s accessible enough to satisfy lay listeners, yet serious enough to impress trained musicians? Morten Lauridsen, that’s who …

Says Mr Lauridsen: “There are too many things out there away from goodness. We need to focus on those things that ennoble us, that enrich us.” The musical language in which he embodies this simple belief is conservative in the best and most creative sense of the word. His sacred music is unabashedly, even fearlessly, tonal, and his chiming harmonies serve as underpinning for gently swaying melodic lines that leave no doubt of his love for medieval plainchant. Nothing about his music is “experimental”: it is direct, heartfelt and as sweetly austere as the luminous sound of church bells at night.

Though Mr Lauridsen is a deeply serious artist, it’s evident from watching Shining Night that there’s nothing stuffy about him. He used to play trumpet in dance bands, and he still loves pop music, from Cole Porter and Miles Davis to Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. What’s more, he believes no less deeply in writing music that is not just for musicians, but for everybody. Of Lux Aeterna he says that “I didn’t want to write an elitist piece that only the very best choirs in the world could perform—I wanted to write a piece that would be within reach of many people, many performers. It’s a piece with a message, and I didn’t want to complicate that message with complicated musical language.” …

Mr Lauridsen is neither an edgy avant-gardist nor a pop-culture panderer. He hasn’t appeared on reality TV and his life, so far as I know, is devoid of scandal. All he does is compose radiantly beautiful music and lead what appears to be a wholly satisfying life, and these days that’s not quite enough to make you a household name.[4]

Brett Campbell wrote in “A Choral Master’s Grass-Roots Appeal”:

Like many other West Coast composers, Mr Lauridsen has never succumbed to the East Coast music establishment’s postwar disdain for melodicism. Brahms and Schubert were early influences, followed by Renaissance and Baroque composers such as Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Palestrina and Tomas Luis de Victoria. Asked what composers he admires most today, he replies, “Bach, Brahms, Britten—composers who take a long line and know what to do with it.”[5] 

Lauridsen’s influences are deep in the Western tradition: he has written about how the “quiet radiance” and “serene simplicity” of Francisco de Zurbaran’s painting Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena gave him “the key to expressing the ‘great mystery’ … [as] described in the medieval text of the O Magnum Mysterium”. [6]

Morten Lauridsen is a contemporary master composer of choral works. His work should be seen in the context of a signal change and broadening that has come about, in which contemporary music in recent decades has benefited from a re-assertion of traditional modes and forms and practice. For example, one thinks of the cognate achievements of Henryk Gorecki, John Rutter, Arvo Part and Sir John Tavener. Watching the film Shining Night or listening to some of Lauridsen’s choral works on CDs or performed live is a more than worthwhile diversion from other cares. It will also serve to uplift the soul, and at a time when our encounters with what is truly uplifting are a very rare delight indeed.

Note: Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen, a film by Michael Stillwater, is produced by Song Without Borders and available on DVD from songwithoutborders.net and other sources. A good selection of Lauridsen’s major works appears on these four CDs: Lux Aeterna (on the Hyperion label); Lux Aurumque (Gothic); Mid-Winter Songs (The Singers); Madrigali: Fire and Roses (Divine Art).

Dr Douglas Hassall, a frequent contributor, reviewed Bill: The Life of William Dobell by Scott Bevan in the June issue