275 Missa Gaia: Earth Mass Celebrating our Seventh Principle

The UU Seventh Principle Project Presents
A Celebration of the Earth
Our Common Ground, Featuring
The Missa Gaia - Earth Mass
by the Paul Winter Consort

The Missa Gaia - Earth Mass was a collective endeavor in typical Winter Consort fashion. Composed and assembled originally for Mothers Day, it was "amassed" as we liked to say, from the members of the group plus a couple of friends. One of the many creative opportunities for me, working with Paul, was our being artists in residence at the Cathedral of St. John in New York City Rev. James Morton, Dean of the Cathedral, invited us to create a piece for the Sunday morning liturgy.

When we began neither Paul or I had ever been to a Mass. My knowledge of the Mass form was from Music History classes at Eastman School of Music. More than a strictly Christian celebration, the Mass is one of the cornerstones of the western music art form in the concert hall as well as the cathedral. There are thousands by the great masters - how would ours be different?

It would be somewhat improvisational, borrow from many religious traditions, mix music of many cultures and even include the voices of other species. We took the name of the Greek goddess Gaia after the writings of James Lovelock, whose "Gaia hypothesis" is that all of life on earth and the earth itself comprises a single living entity that is self-sustaining and, of course, evolving. The recorded melody from a humpback whale provides the opening motif for the Sanctus. The Kyrie starts with a descending call first stated by the wolf and answered by the sax and choir voices. Paul Halley then developed these two themes into majestic choral works.

One of my assignments was the opening Canticle, with the much loved "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" prayer of St. Francis. Musically uniting three widely separated historical periods, the opening Gregorian chant melody evolves into the classic American hymn For the Beauty of the Earth and then to contemporary jazz/popular harmonies and an African 12/8 rhythm. Paul suggested setting St. Francis' prayer to a chord progression of mine - two sequences, one rising one falling - that we'd improvised with in previously unused pieces. I assembled the choral piece and we brought back the For the Beauty theme in elusive harmonization for the finale.

I particularly wanted to do a setting of The Beatitudes. Matthew 5:13 was probably the one biblical zip code I could recall from early Sunday School days. I particularly like that it's positive. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, was giving positive reinforcement - you'll be blessed for this behavior, and it will bring about a blessed state of things. There aren't many musical settings of this, probably because the text does not exactly lend itself. I started with the end and took it a little out of order for my own musical continuity.

The Agnus Dei / Dona Nobis Pacem is probably my favorite, and what Paul called "the sleeper" of the whole work. It starts out unassumingly enough and then rises to a couple of lush climactic moments before the final piece. It was a bit of an challenge to build the choral piece over an instrumental collaboration on a previous album, Callings, which took the calls of sea mammals as thematic material. Using that piece, with the calls of baby seals, was Paul's idea as he had come up with a story of a missionary in the arctic who had discovered that Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God was not understandable to the Eskimo people who had never seen lambs. So he made the phrase "Seal of God."

Two wonderful songs by friends of the Consort round out the whole work. Mystery, by Jeremy Geffen is a deceptively simple and simply beautiful song that touches on the indescribable. The Blue Green Hills of Earth was Paul Winter's adaptation of words from a poem in a Ray Bradbury story and set to music by Kim Olen It made it into the new UU Hymnbook as "For the Earth Forever Turning, " in a somewhat altered arrangement. Here is the original setting, with the words as they are in Singing the Living Tradition. Sing along.

Of the twenty or so performances of The Missa Gaia I performed with the Consort across the country, no two were the same. Aside from the improvised parts we added new pieces highlighting the "latest news." Tonight, we include several other pieces associated with the Winter Consort's ecological themes: A Song for the Earth, which follows the circulatory system of the earth the water cycle; Harmony, which sings of the balance and harmony of nature; and as a finale, Common Ground, the celebrated Winter Consort theme song that sums up the whole idea of all nature communing in one great song and dance.

Jim Scott – Guitars and Vocals
With musicians of the
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville
Rev. Mary Katherine Morn, Minister
Music Director – Jason Shelton

Instrumentalists
Matt Davitch – Soprano Sax and Flute
Shelby Lewis – Bass and Flute
Brian Foti – Drum Set and Percussion
Helen Miller – Percussion
Jay Bird - Percussion

Prelude: Gather the Spirit
Welcome
Adoro te Devote / For the Beauty of the Earth
Canticle of Brother Sun
Prayer
Kyrie
A Song for the Earth
The Beatitudes
Mystery
Sanctus and Benedictus
Harmony
For the Earth Forever Turning
(The Blue Green Hills of Earth)
Prayer
Agnus Dei / Dona Nobis Pacem
For the Beauty of the Earth
and Canticle Reprise / Let Us Go in Peace
Postlude: Common Ground