Credo- concerto per coro

Lyrics: Apostles creed from the latin mass

SSAATTBB divisi

Duration 10′

First performance october 9th 2012 by Gary Graden and S:t Jacobs chamber choir. Broadcast on Swedish national radio.

 

Example Score

 

What is faith?

In religion, faith treated with a certain amount of rigour: The concept of a ”true” and well-defined faith often serves as a watermark to separate the true believers from the heretics. Many times representatives of religion speak of their faith in more rigid language than their colleagues in science speak of physics.

In my language, Swedish, there is furthermore on semantic distinction between ”faith” and ”belief”.

For me, faith is about what is NOT known or certain. It is for me illogical to speak of faith in dogmatic terms. There is as many faiths as there are people on earth.

”Credo: Concerto per coro” is a large scale work for eight-part choir a capella. The piece is in three parts, loosely based the articles of the creed: father-son-spirit. It can also be viewed as a set of variations over the mock-plainchant theme heard in the first part.

The first part a complex structure of a lilting polytonal accompaniment and a mock-plainchant in triple-Canon. The opacity of this segment reflects my own skepticism regarding the first article.

The second section is a funeral march, based on the plainchant theme. The lyrics depicts the very real suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

In the third section, we hear the theme transformed into the zephyric wind of the holy spirit.

The piece is concluded with an ”amen” set to the same music as the first section. In the final bars, a kind of ”dissonant harmony” is achieved: the piece has not delivered any answers about faith – but that is alright!