3. Albright

William Albright (1944-1998)

Chichester Mass

William Albright was a creative musical master of great influence to American music. Born in Gary, Indiana in 1944, he studied music at the Juilliard Preparatory School, Eastman, and the University of Michigan with Ross Lee Finney and Marilyn Mason. He used a Fulbright award to study with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. His compositions earned him many distinctions including selection to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1970 until his death in 1998.

Albright constructed his music with formal integrity that naturally developed from his musical material. He ingeniously imbued his music with rhythmic fervor and prismatic timbres. He was a skilled keyboard player and was greatly influenced by popular music, most notably ragtime. The list of his students is a veritable who's who of emerging and established American composers.

The Chichester Cathedral commissioned Albright to compose the Chichester Mass to celebrate its ninth centenary. Much like a Baroque composer using the doctrine of affections, Albright's five movements from the ordinary of the mass each remain within a single compositional style that reflects the meaning of the words. Each of the movements center on the pitch E, though each explores a different key or mode.

Albright himself, as composer and teacher, was an agent who changed the musical thinking of the people around him in a manner parallel to the way "Das ist je gewisslich wahr" describes St. Paul as a human catalyst. Albright's student Erik Santos explains: "Undoubtedly, Bill was a master of alchemy, a twentieth-century Midas who left a trail of gold behind him. But the legacy is not the gold, it is in the power of transmutation which he passed on through his students and admirers. Each piece was an exercise in the power of metamorphosis. A pedagogy of enlightenment." (Erik Santos, "Requiem for William Albright," Perspectives of New Music 37:1, Winter 1999, 37.)

1. Kyrie

The tripartite Kyrie opens and closes in deep, resonant choral tones. Thick and vivid, at times every pitch in the E Aeolian scale sounds simultaneously. The middle section is a canon that cascades up and down through the treble soloists.

2. Gloria

Albright's Gloria is built on three-chord pillars that ring four times in the course of the movement, simultaneously twisting together E-major and e-minor. According to Albright, the resulting interlocking cross-relation represented the conflict between good and evil. The remainder of the Gloria dances quickly and freshly, similar in style to the syllabic Credo from Stravinsky's Mass (1948).

3. Sanctus

Albright did not set the wordy Credo of the mass. Rather, his gently undulating Sanctus is the Chichester Mass's central movement. Albright's cloud-like, overlapping vocal repetitions are reminiscent of his An Alleluia Super-Round (1973).

4. Benedictus

The Benedictus begins with vigorously chanted solo lines, soon explodes with rhythmic life for the word "Hosanna," and climaxes on a brilliant E Major chord.

5. Agnus Dei

The rich harmonies from the Kyrie recur in the Agnus Dei. The three implorations of the text grow in poignancy and resolve in E-major with added F#. Albright wrote a brief and lively Dismissal for liturgical use, which tonight we omit.