Jacob Cooper’s Stabat Mater Dolorosa
Wordless Music Meets Miller Theatre Festival
Miller Theatre at Columbia University
Saturday 12 September 2009
Jacob Cooper - Stabat Mater Dolorosa, for string quartet, two vocalists, and film (2009)
JACK Quartet
Mellissa Hughes, soprano
Abigail Nims, mezzo-soprano
I’ve been carrying the program for this final performance in the WMMMT Festival around with me for several days, processing this searing work by Jacob Cooper. The JACK Quartet joined forces with soprano Mellissa Hughes and mezzo Abigail Nims, along with an unnamed projectionist (my guess it was Cooper, who created the powerful video).
Starting with the composer’s program notes:
“Stabat Mater Dolorosa is consistent with my recent work in that it uses an extremely slowed-down version of pre-existing music - in this case, the first movement of Pergolesi’s 1736 Stabat Mater - as a point of departure. Rather than depicting the grief of the Virgin Mary during Jesus’s death, as the original Stabat Mater text does, this piece is concerned with the grief of a contemporary mother. In Basra in March of 2008, Leila Hussein helplessly watched her husband murder their daughter Rand in a vicious “honor killing,” an attempt to cleanse the family’s reputation after Rand had fallen in love with a British soldier. The father openly admitted the killing and showed no remorse, yet the Iraqi police did not press charges against him. Leila Hussein, in an act of defiance exceedingly rare in honor killings, subsequently left her husband and publicly grieved over her daughter, expressing profound sorrow and speaking out against the general practice of honor killings. Much of the original Stabat Mater text describes how Mary’s grief was so great that, metaphorically, it caused her to die herself. In Hussein’s case, her public grieving caused her literal death as well: two months after first denouncing her daughter’s murder, she was shot and killed by anti-activists. Stabat Mater Dolorosa is an artistic hyper-magnification of a single instant: the last moment of the daughter’s life and the first of the mother’s death.”
Cooper boosted the meditative impact of the Pergolesi work by slowing tempos down to one-tenth the speed of the original, discarding vibrato, and limiting the dynamic range to sub-piano levels. A film played behind the musicians, at first an undefinable abstract swirl, ever so slowly resolving into the unblinking visage of a dying woman. The JACK Quartet and singers Hughes and Nims were astral, and the mood at the Miller was reverential - it is difficult to imagine a better way to encounter this important composition.
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