Voices of Connection: 11/10 Traditional Spiritual: Were You There
FROM GUEST CURATOR NEIL FARRELL
In 1992 I first sang what to this day remains my absolute favorite spiritual arrangement. "Were you there?" personalizes Jesus's crucifixion as well as any other hymn or chorale in music history, and Nancy Wertsch's intensely sensitive setting captures perfectly the excruciating experience watching it happen must've been for those present. In 1992, only my second year as a member of the Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola (many of whose members have passed through VoA over the years, and still make up some of its membership), I had the privilege of premiering this incredible arrangement, in the performance you'll hear here.
Composers from Monteverdi and Gesualdo, to Bach and Schütz, to Krenek and Pärt have found individual unique ways to employ harmony in evoking the agony of Christ's final hours. Wertsch, too, puts her own set of harmonic tools to work here, assembled from influences as diverse as those mentioned here already and more, particularly from 20th c. popular music and jazz, all integrated with a sensitivity that never sacrifices beauty for the sake of anguish. Her dissonances "hurt so good," as a late 20th century rock song puts it, but which could as readily describe some of Gesualdo's centuries-before-their-time passing tones, suspensions, surprise modulations, and yes, even polychords.
The polytonality that Bartok and Stravinsky brought first to widespread acceptance (also a frequent component of bebop jazz) makes an appearance, too, most notably in the final verse ("...laid him in the tomb") where a wordless countermelody in the alto winds among and around the F major the sopranos stick to doggedly, suggesting the key of Gb major, and the listener can imagine the disorientation and disbelief that Joseph of Arimathea might have felt as the last person to view his Lord's corpse. Only after an agonizing four seconds or so of E natural against the final F of sopranos' melody do the altos give us relief from the final verse's nearly unremitting dissonance, resolving to a unison with that F, and then fading away.
– Neil Farrell, founding member of Voices of Ascension