Grace Notes

Abstract

I was born in the small village of Cecilia, Louisiana in 1938. At some point, my mother brought me to St. Joseph Catholic Church to meet the priest and suggested that I become an altar boy. During the summer months, my three girl first-cousins would spend a month on the farm; we had a great time. As I was hearing my mother talking to the priest, the choir started singing! I turned around and noticed that there were only girls in the choir! I turned to my mother and said, “Mama, I want to sing.” She answered, “If that will make you happy, then sing.”I joined the choir and started learning the Latin Gregorian Mass. I sang the Requiem six days a week and the Sunday High Mass for at least five or six years. We had an old tracker pipe organ which, to hear, was fantastic. A lot of mornings the organist and I were the only ones performing.When I was fourteen I left the choir and the Catholic Church … a private reason. I lost interest in the church when they went from the Latin Mass to English.In 1983, my eighteen-year-old son Russ was murdered at the gas station he was working at. I was devastated and was basically depressed for two years. I did not go back to New York City during that time, which meant my career came to a halt. In 1986, I returned to the city and had dinner with Laurie Anderson. To make a long story short, she invited me to perform with her for a Trisha Brown/Robert Rauschenberg dance performance at BAM. A month later, her manager asked me to go on a twenty-eight-city tour of her Home of the Brave. At the same time, I met Paul Simon and began working with him on his album Graceland. Then I recorded with Talking Heads. In other words, my career was back on track.One evening at the airport in Houston, I ran into Walter Hopps, Dominique de Menil’s curator of her collection. He said, “Dominique is giving commissions to composers for the opening of her collection.” I said I would tell Philip Glass and Steve Reich. He looked at me directly in the eye and said, “No, you think about it.”On the flight back to my home in Lafayette, I came up with the idea to write a Mass in honor of my son. A few months later, Dominique invited me to Houston to help organize music for the week-long celebration of the collection’s opening. I spent five days with ideas, which included brass choirs, string quartets, the Duke Ellington band, a blues band etc., etc. … At the end of the five days, she asked me what I wanted to do. I said I could do a solo concert, but instead I wanted to write a Catholic Mass in Latin. She said, “Why not French?” I replied, “Latin.” She jumped from her chair and clicked her heels and said out loud, “Great, I always wanted a Catholic Mass for the Rothko Chapel.” I also wanted to do something for the loss of my son Russ.I am not a trained composer. In other words, I do not write music down. I go into the studio and record and overdub. So, for me this was a problem. I had to come with written music for a choir to read. At the time, Apple came out with its first Macintosh computer with MIDI and transcription software. I bought it and began the Mass. It took me six months to finish. The premiere was at the Rothko Chapel on June 4, 1987. It was composed for three tenors, three bass; soprano saxophone, soprano soloist, countertenor; one Yamaha TZ81Z tone generator, one Yamaha TZ7 tone generator, and Macintosh plus computer. Mass for Pentecost Sunday was recently performed in Bologna, Italy, in September 2021, at the opening of the G20 International Interfaith Forum.While I was working with Robert Wilson on Oedipus, presented in 2019 at the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus, the Gloria from the Mass was transformed from a choral part into an electronic keyboard piece. We also worked together in the fall of 2022 on Gloria, a 360-degree immersive sound installation with fifteen speakers for the thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which included excerpts from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and the voices of a man, woman, and child. An electronic keyboard was used in Gloria, following the original structure of the hymn.At the moment, I am honoring a commission for a composition for FSCIRE (The Institute for Religious Studies), the largest religious research center in Europe, based in Bologna. It is for a piece called the The Well to honor all persons killed in religious places of worship.Everything that is sacred is here on this earth, among the relationships we have with those who are dearest to us.