KU composer creates choral music to match ‘mystical’ texts

LAWRENCE – The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was a challenging time for Forrest Pierce, professor of composition at the University of Kansas School of Music. He now says his lifeline was writing “The Bell and the Blackbird,” which has its North American premiere in a pair of concerts May 31 and June 1 by the Kansas City, Missouri-based choral group Te Deum.

“All of the choirs all around the world stopped singing for the year because of the pandemic, with the exception of the Australian choirs, so I had a large number of premieres and performances that year that were just canceled,” Pierce said. “Some of those choirs never came back into existence afterward, but the Australian Voices, who commissioned ‘The Bell and the Blackbird,’ kept singing. And it was really a great thing, because it kind of saved me as a composer to have something to work on; where I knew that there were people somewhere in the world who were going to be learning this piece and performing and presenting it.”

It's a setting of a poem by the same title by contemporary Anglo-American David Whyte.

“‘The Bell and the Blackbird’ hasn't been done in North America, so I'm very excited about it,” Pierce said. “That piece is concerned with the liminal spaces, the boundaries between the order and structure of our human existence and our simultaneous attraction to the wildness of utter freedom, and how we go back and forth. The poet compares the sound of a blackbird singing and the sound of a bell, both of which have these very unusual, what we would call nonharmonic spectra.”

Pierce said he tried to convey that musically with a recurring, dissonant motif that never truly gets resolved.

“We find that we actually can live with the tension in the music,” Pierce said. “We can find the right context to make the tension of apparent dissonance part of the harmony. It doesn't need to go anywhere. It doesn't need to do anything. That's just a beautiful sound. And that's part of who we are as humans ... complex and sometimes sweet and sometimes tangy. And, you know, we can live with that.”

Te Deum will perform two other, older works by Pierce.

“The Old Ground” is from 2003 and is a setting of a text by American activist and poet Wendell Berry.

“It's essentially an anthem for Advent — that period that leads up to Christmas in the Christian tradition — that has much broader implications,” Pierce said. “You could say it has more animistic overtones. It's about ... how the earth continually brings forward good things over and over with each season. It's a very mystical text that has to do with spirit and what it means to be human.”

Pierce explained how he wrote the music to underscore Berry’s words: “The text itself references the shepherds in the story of Christmas being visited by the heavenly host — the angels — and being told 'fear not.’ So there's a kind of gesture that's present in the tenors and basses that is a wordless, susurrating, hollow and mysterious melody that's going on while the text is being sung by the sopranos and altos. So that's trying to convey the spirit of life; that it's moving to be reborn again.”

The third Pierce composition Te Deum will perform is “The Darkness Around Us.”

It’s a setting of a work by Kansas-born poet William Stafford.

“It’s about our discourse and the way that ... although we could fool each other, we should remember ... to let our yes mean yes and our no mean no,” Pierce said. “He compares us to a circus parade, where the elephants are all holding the tail of the one in front. And he says that if one elephant should lose its way, then the parade will be lost in the dark. It closes with the phrase, ‘The darkness around us is deep.’ So it's a very somber invitation to the audience to consider the ways we converse with each other and to make wise choices.”

Te Deum takes its name from a hymn and is Latin for “To God.” It specializes in sacred, though not necessarily Christian, music.

Matthew Christopher Shepard, artistic and executive director, said he had “long admired Dr. Pierce’s compositions for their beauty, emotional clarity and expressive depth. What truly sets his work apart, though, is his extraordinary sensitivity to text. His compositions are not only musically compelling — they are anchored by his impeccable selection of texts that speak to something spiritual, enduring and deeply human.”

Shepard said the pieces fit perfectly in a program titled “Harmony of Connections.”

“The texts he sets speak of hope, kindness and personal responsibility — qualities that resonate powerfully in today’s world,” Shepard said. “In each piece, his music doesn’t simply support the text; it expands and deepens it, bringing clarity and emotional resonance that allows the listener to experience the words in new and profound ways.”