Difficult Listening Hour, Part 2: Vocal Music

This week, we feature choral music as our genre for Difficult Listening Hour. It’s music that normally only an elite inner-circle of super-duper classical music snobs would even know about, but since you read iroots.org, you get to experience it too! *Please find the largest/best speakers or headphones you can muster before you continue.

If you missed our first installment, you can catch some difficult listening string quartet music here. Today, we are featuring “[Gloria] Everywhere” by Kamran Rice written and performed in 2007 by Chanticleer, an all male ensemble. It is loosely based on texts by the 13th Century Sufi poet, Jelaleddin Rumi.

One of my favorite poem excerpts is by Rumi:

I know these dancers
Day and night I sing their songs
In this phenomenal cage

My soul, don’t try to answer now!
Find a friend, and hide

But what can stay hidden?
Love’s secret is always lifting its head
Out from under the covers
“Here I am!”

 

Next, we feature “Litany” by Arvo Pärt written in 1994:

O Lord, of Thy heavenly bounties deprive me not.

O Lord, deliver me from the eternal torments.

O Lord, forgive me if I have sinned in my mind or my thought,
whether in word or in deed.

O Lord, free me from all ignorance and forgetfulness,
from despondency and stony insensibility.

O Lord, deliver me from every temptation.

O Lord, enlighten my heart which evil desires have darkened.

O Lord, as a man I have sinned, have though mercy on me,
as the God full of compasion, seeing the feebleness of my soul.

O Lord, send down Thy grace to help me, that I may glorify Thy name.

O Lord Jesus Christ, write me down in the book of life
and grant unto me a good end.

O Lord my God, even if I had not done anything good before Thee,
do Thou help me, in Thy grace, to make a good beginning.

O Lord, sprinkle into my heart the dew of Thy grace.

O Lord of heaven and earth, remember me, Thy sinful servant,
full of shame and imurity, in Thy kingdom. Amen

O Lord, receive me in my penitence.

O Lord, forsake me not.

O Lord, lead me not into misfortune.

O Lord, quicken in me a good thought.

O Lord, give me tears and remembrance of death, and contrition.

O Lord, make me solicitous of confessing my sins.

O Lord, give me fumility, chastity and obedience.

O Lord, give me patience, magnanimity and meekness.

O Lord, implant in me the root of all good – Thy fear in my heart.

O Lord, vouchsafe that I may love Thee from all my soul and mind
and in everything do Thy will.

O Lord, shelter me from certain men, from demons and passions,
and from any other unbecoming thing.

O Lord, Thou knowest that Thou dost as Thy willest,
let then Thy will be done in me, sinner,
for blessed art Thou unto the ages. Amen.

And most difficult of all, we end with a very challenging, epic and colossal work by the Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki written in 1966: The St. Luke Passion which boasts only two major triads in well over an hour of music. Ready?