Ryan Ebright

And for centuries, composers from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt have trod this path musically, through settings of the Passion narratives, Christ’s final words and the anonymous 13th-century poem “Stabat mater dolorosa,” which meditates on the suffering of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as she stands at the cross.

James MacMillan has undertaken this musical pilgrimage several times: a pair of Passions (St. John and St. Luke); multiple Masses; a richly expressive “Seven Last Words from the Cross” and the Stations of the Cross-based piano trio “Fourteen Little Pictures.” But his “Stabat Mater,” written in 2015 and having its American premiere on Thursday at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, offered him something new.

“I’m quite interested in finding new ways of retreading or telling the same story over and over again in different ways,” MacMillan, 60, said in a recent interview. “The ‘Stabat Mater’ allows a different flavor, a different perspective. To see the Passion story through Mary’s eyes, as it were, even before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, was fascinating.”

That perspective is one of pathos sustained through 20 stanzas of Latin verse. MacMillan divides the text into four large movements, each exploring a different shade of grief. The first movement asks, “What person would not weep seeing the Mother of Christ in such agony?” at first gently with a mournful, melismatic soprano solo — then aggressively, with collective shouting. Such contrasts arise throughout: archaic choral polyphony and modernist whisperings, keening string clusters and plaintive drones.

The music, for chamber choir and string ensemble, “is visceral in its energy,” said Harry Christophers, who will conduct the Lincoln Center performance by The Sixteen and the Britten Sinfonia.

MacMillan is one of Scotland’s most prominent living composers. He is also its most outspokenly Catholic. As Philip A. Cooke wrote recently in an incisive study of his music, “not since Olivier Messiaen has a composer given so much of his creative life to faith.”

Even in MacMillan’s early successes, which engaged his country’s musical heritage, he explored sacred themes. His 1990 symphonic poem “The Confession of Isobel Gowdie,” about the 17th-century torture and burning of an accused Scottish witch, ends with a serene string harmonization of a plainchant drawn from the Catholic Requiem Mass. His popular percussion concerto, “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel,” composed two years later, incorporates other Catholic plainsongs.

MacMillan has since become a prolific choral composer. He was first commissioned by The Sixteen in 2002, for a setting of “O bone Jesu”; this led to a productive artistic relationship. In 2009, MacMillan created a lush, expansive “Miserere” (which will open the Lincoln Center program) for them; they later helped to start the Cumnock Tryst music festival in his hometown. This year, The Sixteen performed in the premiere of MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony.

The idea for a new “Stabat Mater,” however, came from the philanthropist John Studzinski, whose Genesis Foundation has championed both MacMillan and The Sixteen. The poem has a robust musical history — settings include 16th-century liturgical a cappella ones by Palestrina and Lassus, and large-scale Romantic concert works by Dvorak, Liszt and Verdi — but it was relatively overlooked by composers in the 20th century.

After commissioning a series of shorter “Stabat Mater” pieces in 2014 from Alissa Firsova, Tonu Korvits and Matthew Martin (playfully called the “mini-martyrs” by Studzinski and Christophers), the Genesis Foundation ordered a full-scale work from MacMillan. The Sixteen and the Britten Sinfonia premiered his “Stabat Mater” in 2016 in London; two years later, they performed it at the Vatican’s, in the Sistine Chapel, which is rarely used for concerts.

For MacMillan, the “Stabat Mater” holds personal relevance: Shortly after he completed it in 2015, his 6-year-old granddaughter, Sara, died. But he also finds in it a broader resonance. The death of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned that same year while crossing the Mediterranean, MacMillan said, “gave me a wider context to consider the ‘Stabat Mater’ as really quite a modern statement.”

And, Christophers said, “you can be of any faith or no faith to get inside this poem and really realize that actually what James is writing is something very much for the 21st century.”

Although MacMillan’s faith gives his work a Catholic hue, he sees himself as part of a widespread search among composers for the sacred in contemporary music. Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina and Osvaldo Golijov are just some of the composers who have written a Passion since 2000; others, like Tan Dun and Philip Glass, have reimagined the Passion genre to include Buddha and Ramakrishna.

“You imagine the Passion text as being of antiquity and in a sense not of modernity,” MacMillan said. “But Penderecki’s ‘St. Luke Passion’ in the late 1960s showed that even using some of the most forthright modern musical language, there was real scope to re-enter this traditional world, the greatest story ever told, as it were, and to tell it anew with a new language. And ever since there’s a number of very different kinds of composers retreading these steps.”

MacMillan plans to return to the Passion story, to set the words of St. Matthew and St. Mark. But for the moment he’s working on something more joyful: a Christmas oratorio.

‘MacMillan: Stabat Mater’: Nov. 7 at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan, lincolncenter.org

This article originally appeared in

A 'Stabat Mater' Colored by a Composer's Faith

For centuries, Franciscan monks have led pilgrims along the Via Dolorosa, or “path of sorrows,” that Christ is believed to have walked to his crucifixion. This devotional practice, mirrored in churches worldwide in the Lenten Stations of the Cross, encourages reflection and penitence.

To that end, Hughes had also created a small poetry collection called “‘The Negro Mother’ and Other Dramatic Recitations.” The six poems within sketch incisive portraits of black life in the Jim Crow era. Hughes wrote the poems to be spoken rather than read — performed, with music, in the schools, churches and halls of black America.

He might have been surprised to see Lincoln Center added to that list.

Composer Michael Schachter and bass-baritone Davóne Tines have adapted the most striking of the poems, “The Black Clown,” into a music-theater piece that will have its New York premiere at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Wednesday. Mixing jazz, oratorio, Broadway, gospel and other musical traditions, the show traces its clown protagonist’s journey through the terror of slavery and the shackled freedom of Jim Crow toward a self-proclaimed humanity.

“The Black Clown,” Tines said in a recent interview, “is our most earnest attempt to realize Hughes’ project for making the larger humanity understand a single person, and thus understand itself.”

In their adaptation, Schachter and Tines adhere faithfully to the unusual text, which Hughes described as a “dramatic monologue.” The poem is a theatrical miniature, divided in print into two columns.

On the right, which Hughes labels “The Poem,” is the rhyming main text. On the left, “The Mood” offers terse commentary and performance indications, a kind of score in words. These range from the general — “gay and low-down blues” and “melancholy jazz” should be played at certain points, Hughes suggests — to the specific: He mentions lines from the spirituals “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Motherless Child.”

The poem is impassioned, incantatory and concentrated: “God! Give me the spotted / Garments of a clown / So that the pain and the shame / Will not pull me down.”

“In just two pages and a few short stanzas,” Schachter said in an interview, “the poem encapsulates very complex ideas about clowning; about using masks in performance to survive in a hostile social environment; about the history of race and African American history in America; about the mechanisms of resistance and claiming one’s humanity in the face of oppression.”

Featuring a vocal ensemble of 13 and a Cab Calloway-style dance orchestra, the 70-minute show deftly evokes the brassy vitality of a 1920s speak-easy, the relentless rhythms of the cotton fields and the congregational fervor of a Southern Baptist religious service.

Tines and Schachter’s collaboration developed out of their friendship and shared interest in Hughes’ poetry. In 2010, Schachter suggested tackling “The Black Clown,” composing a sensitive setting of Hughes’s poem “Heart,” in 2011, as a sort of trial run.

“It hit me over the head,” Tines said of “The Black Clown.” “The poem put in very clear and concise terms things that I wanted to express about myself and the larger African American experience that weren’t even apparent to myself until reading the poem.”

What began as a “Dichterliebe”-style song cycle for baritone and piano eventually transformed — under the auspices of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it premiered last year — into an evening-length ensemble piece directed by Zack Winokur. This expansion came from a growing realization, Tines said, “that this actually wasn’t the voice of one person.”

“It was,” he added, “a collective speaking to America.”

The writing of “The Black Clown” coincided with Hughes’s growing attraction to leftist politics in the early 1930s, as the Great Depression ravaged black communities economically and the Scottsboro Nine trial thrust racial injustice into the national spotlight. But the poem lacks the confrontational bite of the ones he wrote shortly after, such as his racially charged “Christ in Alabama,” his anti-imperialist “Merry Christmas” or his anti-capitalist “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.”

Instead, the inspirational poems that accompanied “The Black Clown” were aimed at, Hughes wrote, “the hearts of the people,” rather than the intelligentsia. He partnered with illustrator Prentiss Taylor to form the short-lived Golden Stair Press and publish “The Negro Mother.”

On tour, this pamphlet was a hit. The 25-cent copies, Hughes joked, “sold like reefers on 131st Street.”

Despite its popularity at the time, the poems of “The Negro Mother” have been largely overlooked by composers in favor of the blues-inflected contents of the collections “The Weary Blues” and “The Dream Keeper.” Of the more than 250 published songs that have used his poems, by composers including Margaret Bonds, William Grant Still, Elie Siegmeister and Ricky Ian Gordon, few if any come from “The Negro Mother.”

Even so, “The Black Clown” has a strong connection to better-known Hughes poems like “A Black Pierrot” and “Heart.” The character of the clown recurs throughout his early work — a means of exploring race and sexuality, as well as vaudevillian blackface. In many instances (though not “The Black Clown”), Hughes directly refers to Pierrot, the naïve, sensitive commedia dell’arte clown who inspired Picasso, Schoenberg, T.S. Eliot and other modernists of the early 20th century.

For Hughes, the figure of the clown was a theatrical analogue to jazz, which he called “the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” Pierrot, Tines said, is “a plastic figure that many people can find themselves mirrored within.”

Contemporary audiences may also see in the clown a reflection of “code-switching,” the practice of altering one’s speech and behavior to fit different social situations.

“We’re getting at this complex dynamic where people in African American cultures are forced to perform and put on multiple consciousnesses,” Schachter said. “There’s an element to the show where no matter how we try to escape it, the audiences at Lincoln Center and elsewhere probably are going to be predominantly affluent and white, looking at black Broadway performers entertaining onstage.”

This presents a challenge, he added: “How can we do that in a way that does honor to the history and intensity of the poem’s message without also being admonishing?”

That message — a celebration of common humanity coupled with an unflinching look at humanity’s collective failings — remains timely in an era of resurgent ethnic nationalism and metastasizing income inequality.

With “The Black Clown,” Tines said, “Hughes was tapping into and providing a blueprint for how social justice has happened in the past, how it needed to happen in his time, and how it needs to happen today.”

Wednesday through July 27 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, Manhattan; 212-721-6500, mostlymozart.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/music/langston-hughes-black-clown-mostly-mozart-lincoln-center.html" id="1f3f89b9-da0a-3779-a06b-1cf49495a3e7">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — “I feel that for the first time, I have met the South,” poet Langston Hughes wrote in the winter of 1932, at the end of a monthslong, multistate reading tour designed to cultivate black audiences.

Langston Hughes Sings in 'The Black Clown'

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Ryan Ebright

Articles written by the author

A 'Stabat Mater' Colored by a Composer's Faith

Langston Hughes Sings in 'The Black Clown'