Toward “Transcendence”: Music and Meditation in Michael McGlynn’s O Maria

The March/April 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Toward ‘Transcendence’: Music and Meditation in Michael McGlynn’s O Maria” by Seán Doherty. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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The term “transcendence” appears frequently in discourse regarding contemporary choral music. It is often used synonymously with its related adjectival forms of “transcendent” and “transcendental.”
An examination of these usages reveals that the term is seldom intended in its technical philosophical or theological definition in this discourse, but most often refers to music that induces a sense of meditation, reflection, and serenity in the listener. An interview with Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo offers one example: Dissonance and high chromaticism is important to explore; the Modernists were brave to
delve into parts of the human psyche that are dark and edgy, but I do think they got somewhat stuck in that. A lot of art pushed audiences away for some time. I think people naturally and instinctively want to experience transcendence, resolution and the feeling of redemption, joy and peace that the resolving of discord can yield.1

This usage of the term does not necessarily assume an experience of the divine but is used in contradistinction to a particular repertoire that is perceived as difficult and alienating. Scholar Nick Strimple identified a “new transcendental school” of composers who, as an extreme generality, exhibit similar preferences for setting religious texts with slow-moving harmonies of added-note chords.2

A consideration of the highly abstract term “transcendence” in the individual usages of composers, performers, audiences, and commentators poses a number of questions about the complex relationships between music and religion in contemporary society.3 The manifold and ambiguous usages of the term allows audiences to engage with the music from a theistic perspective, in which the experience leads one to the divine; or a rationalist perspective, which explains transcendence as a heightened level of feeling,4 or at any point on a continuum between these two perspectives. It is incumbent on scholars of choral music to discern which of the various definitions of the term is intended.

The following analysis will examine a number of musico-rhetorical strategies deployed by the composer Michael McGlynn to achieve what the composer himself defines as a “transcendent state” in his choral work O Maria. This discussion attempts to give this elusive term a firmer analytical footing in the musicological discussion of contemporary choral music. McGlynn’s choral works have been analyzed as part of three doctoral dissertations,5 but no scholarly attention has yet been given to O Maria (SATB div. a cappella). This work, unlike much of McGlynn’s output, is not written in an overtly Irish idiom and does not incorporate elements from traditional song repertoire.6

Read the rest of this article in the March/April 2022 issue of Choral Journal.

Notes
1 Ola Gjeilo, quoted in Kira Zeeman Rugen, “The Evolution of Choral Sound: In Professional Choirs from the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2013), 91.
2 This school includes the composers Morten Lauridsen, Dan Forrest, Jake Runestad and Paul Mealor. Nick Strimple quoted in Paul Mealor, “Music from the New Transcendental School” (keynote lecture, Association of British Choral Directors Convention 2019, Royal Conservatoire Birmingham UK, August 22, 2019).
3 James MacMillan, “The Most Spiritual of the Arts: Music, Modernity, and the Search for the Sacred,” in Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century, ed. George Corbett (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 9-16, 16.
4 Jonathan Arnold, ‘Sacred Music in Secular Spaces,’ in Annunciations, 325-35, 334.
5 Karen Marrolli, “An Overview of the Choral Music of Michael McGlynn with a Conductor’s Preparatory Guide to his Celtic Mass” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2010); Stacie Lee Rossow, “The Choral Music of Irish Composer Michael McGlynn” (Ph.D diss., University of Miami, 2010); Bernie Sherlock, “Contemporary Irish Choral Music and an Outline of its Historical Origins,” 2 vols (Ph.D. diss., Royal Irish Academy of Music, 2018).
6 Rossow, “Choral Music,” 11.