Customer Reviews

Pagan Mass

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Schroeder: Pagan Mass. (Guide to Records).
American Record Guide, by Lindsay Koob

With his Pagan Mass, Pierre Schroeder celebrates humanity as opposed to divinity. The piece is essentially spiritual, if neither liturgically true nor conventionally sacred. The recurring themes include the divine spark in all of us, our cultural diversity and how we achieve worldly immortality--both collectively and by ourselves: the eternal cycle of earthly life and how the best of us manage to enrich posterity with our creative gifts.

This is not so much a choral work as a heady collage of disparate choral, orchestral, solo vocal, spoken, percussive, and synthesized elements, artfully juxtaposed and blended into a coherent and listenable whole. The glue holding the whole thing together is the composer's work at the synthesizer, which apparently produces all keyboard passages, most of the choral effects (no chorus is credited) and sampled sounds including spoken dialog and crowd noises.

High points for me included the Credo in Vitam Perpetuam, a skillfully assembled evocation of life as a perpetual cycle. Based on the way we measure time, it is built on a 24-bar theme repeated seven times, with mesmerizing effect. Non sperantibus in Ecclesiam (Not hoping in the Church), is guaranteed to raise the hackles of Christian musicians, as it dismisses organized religion with a harsh musical satire of sacred convention: a serene Gregorian chant that slowly transmutes into a militant march, complete with ceremonial bells and drums--then ends with the bleak and empty sounds of the wind.

Although much of this piece at first smacked distinctly of new-age music to me, repeated listening revealed an imaginative musical craftsman at work, capable of evoking real wonder, mystery, reverence, and celebration. Schroeder, a native of France, dips freely into the jazz idiom here, as well as the musical traditions of the Middle East and Africa. He is apparently a fixture in the avant-garde musical scene in Southern California, having won various choral and chamber orchestra competitions and written effective electronic and orchestral scores for various short films. (...) The versatile composer even contributed his own rather striking cover art.