The Politicized Concert Mass (1967-2007)

From Secularism to Pluralism

Stephanie Rocke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032271514
• eBook ISBN: 9781000620573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Since the transformative 1960s, concert masses have incorporated a range of political and religious views that mirror their socio-cultural context. Those of the long 1960s (c1958-1975) reflect non-conformism and social activism; those of the 1980s, environmentalism; those of the 1990s, universalism; and those of the 2000s, cultural pluralism. Despite utilizing a format with its roots in the Roman Catholic liturgy, many of these politicized concert masses also reflect the increasing religious diversification of Western societies. By introducing non-Catholic and often non-Christian beliefs into masses that also remain respectful of Christian tradition, composers in the later twentieth century have employed the genre to promote a conciliatory way of being that promotes the value of heterogeneity and reinforces the need to protect the diversity of musics, species and spiritualities that enrich life. In combining the political with the religious, the case studies presented pose challenges for both supporters and detractors of the secularization paradigm. Overarchingly, they demonstrate that any binary division that separates life into either the religious or the secular and promotes one over the other denies the complexity of lived experience and constitutes a diminution of what it is to be human.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• Part I Challenging boundaries in the long 1960s
• Part II Expanding the concert mass into new territories
• 3 Christianity as everyday practice: Paul Chihara’s Missa Carminum: Folk Song Mass (1975)
• 4 David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus: A Mass for Love and Peace (1973)
• Part III God meets Gaia: concert masses for the environment
• 5 Paul Winter’s Missa Gaia / Earth Mass (1981) and Paul Patterson’s Mass of the Sea (1983)
• 6 David Lentz and Jessica Karraker’s wolfMASS (1987) and Libby Larsen’s Missa Gaia: Mass for the Earth (1992) 139
• Part IV Reflecting religious diversity
• 7 Universalistic approaches: Roger Davidson’s Missa Universalis I, II and III (1987–1992) and Luis Bacalov’s Misa Tango (1997)
• 8 Towards Pluralism: Carman Moore’s Mass for the 21st Century (1994–1995)
• 9 Pluralism in two twenty-first-century concert masses: Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace (2000) and And on Earth Peace: A Chanticleer Mass (2007)
• Conclusion: From secularism to pluralism in forty years of politicized concert masses
• Index
• Concert Mass Index