Mixed Chorus Unaccompanied
Text: Liturgical (Greek and Latin)
Duration: ca. 10 minutes
Publisher: C. F. Peters Corporation, Edition Peters 67612
Second Prize, 5e Concours International de Musique Sacrée, Festival de Musique Sacree de Fribourg (Switzerland), 1993
Mass for All Saints, begun in 1987, is an outgrowth of my association since 1985 with the Choir of All Saints Church in the City of New York and with Dr. David Hurd, its Director of Music from 1985 to 1997. The privilege (all too rare in most churches these days) of performing, week after week, the great chants of the church as well as the polyphony of such masters as Byrd, Josquin, Palestrina, Lassus, Monteverdi, Tallis and Victoria with a fine ensemble of dedicated musicians has profoundly affected the way that I approach writing music, be it vocal or instrumental, sacred or secular. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr. Hurd and to his successor at All Saints, Dr. Gail Archer, as well as to my colleagues in the Choir of All Saints Church and the clergy and members of the parish not only for the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by this magnificent body of musical literature, but for their encouragement of me as a composer over the years; it has been an honor and a pleasure to have had this work and several of my other compositions used in the context of the liturgy at All Saints, and to have been commissioned by the church.
The mass was awarded a second prize in the 5th International Competition in Composition of Sacred Music (1993) of the Fribourg Festival of Sacred Music in Fribourg, Switzerland. The first performance of the complete work, by the Choir of the North German Radio (Hamburg) under the direction of Horst Neumann, took place on July 3, 1994 as part of the Fribourg Festival in the Church of the College of Saint-Michel in Fribourg.
Two incipits are given for the Gloria in excelsis Deo; either one may be used, as both serve as sources of thematic material for this movement.