MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Universal Awe Inspires Mechem’s ‘Island in Space’ : Astronaut Russell Schweickart’s poetic words form the core of the piece to be sung by the Pacific Chorale in Costa Mesa on Saturday.

Contrary to opinion in some quarters, classical music has always been responsive to its time.

Handel commemorated a contemporary military victory most people no longer even remember in his “Dettingen Te Deum.” Beethoven started out writing a symphony to praise Napoleon as a great liberator, then tore off the dedication page when Napoleon declared himself just another emperor. Hence Beethoven renamed the work the “Eroica” Symphony, dedicated “to the memory of a great man.”

San Francisco composer Kirke Mechem found inspiration in the words of Russell Schweickart, the Apollo 9 astronaut who was the first human to complete an unattached spacewalk on the 1969 mission to the moon.

In a speech that was widely reported, Schweickart talked about what the earth looked like from space: “The earth is a whole--so beautiful, so small and so fragile. You realize that on that small spot is everything that means anything to you. . . . “

These words form the core of Mechem’s “Island in Space,” to be sung by the Pacific Chorale led by John Alexander on Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Although the composer and the former astronaut have talked by phone, they will meet for the first time at the 7 p.m. preconcert lecture at the center.

“We were going to fly down with Schweickart and his wife,” Mechem said in a recent phone interview from his home, “but when I found out how small the plane is going to be--he’s leasing a small plane he often uses--and that the flight would take four hours, I begged off. All my life I’ve been susceptible to motion sickness.”

Mechem was surprised when Schweickart replied “ ‘Me, too.’ He’s the first astronaut who admitted it--not the first who got sick, but who was the first to admit it. (As he put it), ‘It’s OK when you get sick. When I got sick in outer space, it was all over the front page of the New York Times.’ ”

Mechem wrote the work in 1990 for a chorus at Cal State Chico, which was about to make a tour to the former Soviet Union, Poland and other Eastern-Bloc countries.

“I tried to think what would make a good universal text for them to take and hit upon the words by Rusty Schweickart, which were so moving,” Mechem said.

“I used only a portion of his original speech. I really had to cut it down to make a choral piece out of it, the same way a librettist does with a play or a novel when he or she is making an opera out of something.”

He interspersed Schweickart’s words with the Latin prayer “Dona Nobis Pacem” (“Give Us Peace”) and a fragment of a poem by Archibald MacLeish that echoes Schweickart’s sentiment.

“Both these texts really say what I’m trying to say, only much more eloquently and more succinctly,” Mechem said.

The piece is written for unaccompanied chorus and lasts about seven minutes. The prayer for peace is interwoven throughout both texts.

“I also wanted to create a sense of the shimmering quality of outer space somehow as a background to the astronaut’s words,” the composer said. So he divided the women’s voices into several parts that “cross back and forth over an undulating (interval of a) second . . . so you get an otherworldly sound.

“It’s hard for the ear to fasten on, hard to tell what’s happening there. It was kind of an experiment to see if it would work out as I hoped it would, and fortunately it did. It’s nothing off-putting. I don’t think anybody needs to be scared off from that word ‘experiment.’ ”

Born in Wichita, Kan., Mechem, 68, grew up in Topeka, went to Stanford and Harvard universities, then returned to teach at Stanford.

“I did a stint in the lofty position of assistant sports editor at the Topeka Daily Capital,” he added. “I probably (also) am the only composer who played No. 1 tennis for Stanford. It’s hard to categorize me.”

But one category he refuses to be put in is that of an “avant-garde composer.”

“I’m not a really avant-garde composer at all,” he said. “I don’t really believe in experimental art of any kind, in the sense that I think a great artist experiments in his or her own studio, but then it shouldn’t be an experiment any more when it reaches the public.

“Those questions being experimented should have been solved. If you find it doesn’t work, you don’t foist it off on the public.”

Mechem’s setting actually is only one of “perhaps two dozen” adaptations of Schweickart’s original talk at the Lindisfarne Assn. Fellows Meeting in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1974.

“The text has been put to music, put to dance, transcribed into different books and different magazine articles and many, many different things,” Schweickart, 58, said by phone from San Francisco.

The Lindisfarne Assn. is “a community of people of all walks of life who are interested in religion and philosophy and the development of human culture,” he said.

Although Schweickart’s flight into space was “without question a life-shaping experience,” he said, “it wasn’t until 1974 when I made this presentation that I articulated for myself and brought together in a single presentation my real understanding of what had happened not only to me but also to humanity in terms of our beginning, (our) birth into the space or our evolution beyond the limits of the earth.”

He had not specifically planned the speech. “It came out almost automatically, almost subconsciously, in which I listened to it almost as part of the audience. It was for me one of those moments in life when I heard it for the first time at the same time I was saying it.

“I hope people are able as they listen to (Mechem’s setting) to place themselves, momentarily at least, in a space where they can in some sense look back not only at the earth as I did, but also at humankind and where we are going as a people, as a life form, as we move into the future.”

* John Alexander will conduct the Pacific Chorale in Kirke Mechem’s “Island in Space” on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The program also will include works by Samuel Barber, Rene Clausen, Jackson Berkey and others. $15 to $40. (714) 252-1234.