Resounding Verse
Join music theorist Stephen Rodgers as he explores how composers transform words into songs. Each episode discusses one poem and one musical setting of it. The music is diverse—covering a variety of styles and time periods, and focusing on composers from underrepresented groups—and the tone is accessible and personal. If you love poetry and song, no matter your background and expertise, this show is for you. Episodes are 20-40 minutes long and air every couple of months.
Resounding Verse
Alleluia: Nathaniel Bellows and Sarah Kirkland Snider
The Mass for the Endangered, by Nathaniel Bellows and Sarah Kirkland Snider, appeals not to God but to nature itself and (in Snider's words) takes the "musical modes of spiritual contemplation" associated with the Latin mass and applies them to "concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment."
The third movement of the Mass, "Alleluia," describes the brutal destruction of the natural world yet at the same time offers a promise of renewal.
The episode features a recording of the movement by Gallicantus, under the direction of Gabriel Crouch; an album of the entire Mass was released in 2020 by New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records.
If you're interested in learning about another haunting collaboration by Bellows and Snider, check out my podcast episode on "The River," from their song cycle Unremembered.
Alleluia
Nathaniel Bellows
Sea of cradle, foundling,
current, cold and quelled as morning.
Braid of vapored ashes,
shadowed creche, collapsing.
Contour, carve, corrode—
breathe through camphor, coal,
seed each breeze with gold.
Poison, parch, pollute—
plow the coast, the dune,
flow toward constant moon.
Alleluia
Hearth of stone, of tar, of lava,
shelter shielding mother.
Oh, save us mother!
She who is sleeping,
Is she who will wake.
Fracture, foist, defoul—
shatter cliff and shoal,
sand each stone to whole.
Harbored, held, unharmed—
she’ll wake, rise, rejoin,
her daughters and her sons.
Alleluia