Three Pieces from PASSION WITH TROPES (1982)

Soprano and Brass Quintet – 6 mins.

[solo sop. / Ctpt+tpt.hn.tbn.tba.]

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Program Note

PASSION WITH TROPES is a collage of various music, theatre, and music-theatre experiences, using a collage of texts about religion, love, death, and the experience of human existence. It may be described as a theatre work about the experience of attending an oratorio (or, more specifically, a Passion). But the medium of the oratorio is supplemented or challenged by the invasion of other musical and dramatic media (e.g., chamber songs, pop songs, excerpts from plays, poetry recitations, philosophical declarations, sermons, processions) just as the scriptural telling of the Passion story is convoluted, supplemented, and challenged by texts from the works of over 40 poets, playwrights, and philosophers. (The word “trope” has a double meaning: in one sense, the use of a word or expression in a figurative way; in another, better known to students of music history, a phrase or verse added as an embellishment or interpolation to sung parts of the Mass in the medieval period.) The performing forces for PASSION WITH TROPES consist of the traditional oratorio forces of chorus, orchestra and a quartet of “oratorio” vocal soloists, but these are counterpointed (or “troped”) by supplementary forces: a quartet of “chamber” vocal soloists, a woodwind quintet, a string quintet, a brass quintet, a trio of guitar, piano and vibraphone, solo percussion, a chant choir, a jazz ensemble with four “pop” singers, six actors and a narrator. Although the numbers performed by these adjunct forces are integral to the formal and dramatic structure of the complete work (which consists of 72 numbers and is nearly three hours long), they have been conceived in such a way as to make them performable either as individual numbers, or in groups, such as the collection presented here.