All Night Vigil_11.16.13

     Last night, I listened to the San Francisco Choral Society sing Sergei Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil at St. Ignatius Church on the USF Campus.  The acapella chorus was over 200 singers strong and they sang the entire 15 part work in Russian.  About 2 hours in length, the concert was very enjoyable, even though I don't understand the language.  The choir sounded great in that big church.  I have never listened to a choir that large sing Gregorian or Romantic style religious music, so hearing so many voices singing in harmony together was a beautiful new experience.  There were tons of people there for the evening.  When I arrived, I was dismayed to see a long line stretching down the hill.  The line moved briskly, though, and within minutes I was inside the church, observing the crowd and admiring the decorative sanctuary.

     I like St. Ignatius Church.  It's visual forms are attractive to me.  They remind of me of travel, of all the churches I've seen in Europe.  I feel like a visitor in ornate religious environments.  When I was growing up, I did not experience this kind of church.  The churches I attended consisted of a cross, usually hung on the front wall, a pulpit, and a table.  Musical instruments usually sat onstage, with a flower arrangement set in a vase atop the piano. But that was all there was to the visual representations of religious belief in my father's church.  Unlike old European cathedrals, where was no ancient feeling of reverential belief.  Marble statues, mosaics, oil paintings, tapestries, stained glass, candles, bas reliefs, wood carvings, crypts, tombs, holy bones, robes, pointy hats, incense, processionals, Latin, chanting.  The art and artifice of both occidental and oriental religious belief did not really exist.  Perhaps this absence of representations of faith explains both my current fascination with churches like St. Ignatius as well as my feeling of being a tourist in these churches.  I cannot experience the real feelings on display, the sincerity and depth of faith, but I see it and wish to record it.  Nostalgia for a faith I once felt could be the underlying motivation here.

  

From my seat in general admission, where I found myself behind one of the columns because I did not arrive early, I recorded this image of people sitting in the preferred section.  I like all of the heads and faces here, how their are distributed in the fore and mid ground.  The people provide base weight for the image, while the columns, which divide the top part of the image, root and ground the image and simultaneously point your gaze upward, to pause at the Stations of the Cross paintings before rising up into the arches and illuminated ceiling.  It's a square picture, edited and adjusted in Snapseed, which I've come to love as a photo app.  All of these jpgs were shot and edited on my iPhone, which I use as my primary camera now.  Though it's more tedious to import images and post onto this blog, I have come to appreciate what app editing can do, both through Instagram and now Snapseed.  I don't think I could have made this image look as graphic and 'painterly' without the app selections.

 

 

     Here is my view of the choir from behind the big black column.  At least I could look around it to get a view of the singers.  They sung the Gregorian chant 'Hodie Christus Natus Est' to begin the evening, and from the very first sound of echoing notes I was transported.  The beauty of voices singing in perfect harmony, in high, middle and low registers, with cathedral acoustics, is dramatic and pleasing to the soul, to bite off the cliche.  Once the choir got into Rachmaninoff, the experience began to extend itself and expand into something of a personal experience deep with individual significance.  The singing begins and continues in the present, which second by second becomes past.  The music pushes time constantly forward, in a sense, leads the listener through the present temporal moment, and pulls up thoughts, images, memories, feelings and sentiments that are colored by the musics specific tone of mood.  Here it may be reflective, downhearted, or sad, while there it may be joyful, full, striving and light.  One's inner journey while listening to work like the All-Night Vigil is a private thing, but witnessed in a congregation, in a church sanctuary.  Until the Vigil ends, and we go our separate ways.