Mass Redux
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Poet: Lee Scrivner
Composer: Katheryn Butler
Tenor: Tom Herford
Vibraphone: Ruth Gomes
Listen to Mass Redux
Lee Scrivner on Mass Redux
Collaborating for the Voiceworks project felt almost effortless. I had been spinning some of the lines of the poem that was to become Mass Redux in my head for some time. I met with my co-conspirator Katie Butler a few times near the Barbican, and we chatted over coffee about ideas. She showed me some pictures she had taken of some of her recent travels, and I was inspired by one in particular, of a man walking under a shaft of light at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It reminded me of a poem I had been working on about the oculus of the Pantheon (also in Rome), which I always felt to be one of the most perfect (and obviously sturdy) buildings in Europe. The poem began to congeal into its present form shortly thereafter.
Katie’s photograph and my memory of the Pantheon evoked the sense of a vast architecture, not only of brick but also of culture, its gods looming both inspiringly and oppressively above the diminutive human flesh and bones below. The poem shows this contrast, this paradox, that those very things that are our free expressions (architecture, poems, religions) can in time accrue a certain oppressive weight. (I had been reading Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life" from his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen). In this poem, the human defiantly persists guilt-free at the center of a perpetual cycle: a rising of ambitious production into a vaulting, overhanging burden and its eventual collapse into dust underfoot. Katie rightly chose to give this a plainchant feel, as if it was delivered by a lone voice in the Pantheon itself, or in an airy Gothic cathedral. The music also seems to evoke a gradual line-by-line stratification of structure, slowly building, an eventual climactic moment of dismay, and a collapse.
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