Transitional Time in Music of the Season

A few years ago, American composer Christopher Rouse wrote a fascinating series of Christmas carols--”Karolju”--in invented foreign languages meant to sound like carols we’ve always known but which were in fact new. That may be the postmodern way to capture the naive wonder of childhood, but it is also fairly typical of the way composers have long taken advantage of music’s ability to produce nostalgia, something indispensable at Christmastime.

But it wasn’t always so. If we go back in music history far enough, back to the 12th century when music was just breaking out of chant and discovering harmony and counterpoint, we find a very different vision of Christmas. And it was that vision--mystical and earthly at the same time, and concerned far less with the past than with immediate experience--that the early music vocal ensemble Sequentia brought to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, Sunday afternoon.

Although one of the most prominent of the early music ensembles in Cologne, Germany, Sequentia--formed by Americans Benjamin Bagby and Barbara Thornton--has a distinctly American flavor to it. What exactly creates that is hard to pin down. It surely has something to do with the unfussy, almost jazz-like nature of the singing, and the fact that the ensemble welcomes well-rounded singers like Frank Kelley, who is remembered from his vital performances in Peter Sellars’ productions of “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte.” A stylish, all-black Donna Karan-look doesn’t hurt either.

The Christmas that Sequentia celebrated in Westminster Presbyterian, a Gothic revival church selected by the series Chamber Music in Historic Sites as an apt visual and acoustic setting, came from monasteries in Aquitaine, which were actively inventing a new music for the 12th century. Thus these pieces retain the communal value of chanting as a way of holding on to the mystical vision of Christmas in a world turning modern. But they can’t resist the new world for long. As the music eagerly branches out into counterpoint and harmony, it tends to get carried away with its ability to better express the complex emotions of newly developing urban life.

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Sometimes, as in the “‘Uterus hodie,” a listener is simply stopped in his tracks. The text speaks of the virgin birth with unembarrassed sexual imagery, while the music evokes a kind of still rapture, as if the music might explain physically just how this all could have come about. The soloist here was Suzanne Ehly, whose purity of tone further implied ravishment.

Equally amazing was “Iudicii signum,” a Scrooge-like Christmas vision of a wrathful God--”In sign of judgment shall the earth with sweat be drenched” is the refrain. Here Thornton was the soloist. She is a self-involved singer whose theatrical style seems a cross between something out of a John Cassavetes movie and the kind of performance one encounters from young poets reading in coffeehouses these days. That she is also a historically informed musician makes her act all the more arresting.

There was also joy on hand in the musical selections, and Sequentia certainly has no trouble with that. Indeed ecstasy and joy seem second nature to the singers, and the lively harp playing of Bagby and the fiddle playing of Elizabeth Gaver were equal in spirit. Luckily Sequentia has a beautiful new CD, “Shining Light” on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, that recaptures much of this magical material.