Spratlan's "Hesperus' by Network for New Music and The Crossing

My personal prize for the season's most entertaining text goes to composer Lewis Spratlan, who won a somewhat better known award, the Pulitzer Prize, in 2000. For Hesperus Is Phosphorous, his new work for small chorus and six instrumentalists, Spratlan created musical settings of three witty prose vignettes on the afterlife taken from Sum, an odd little international bestseller by the neuroscientist David Eagleman.

In Eagleman's first vignette, God decides She made a mistake when She divided mankind into good and evil people. She lets everybody into Heaven and achieves a great human dream: a world of true equality.

Naturally, Her innovation only creates universal unhappiness. "The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote."

Eagleman calls himself a "possibilist" rather than an atheist or agnostic. "Real science," he says, "always operates by holding lots of interesting possibilities in mind and working to see which one is most supported by the data." His 40 visions of the afterlife in Sum "explore and celebrate" the infinite possibilities offered by the universe, in contrast to the limited visions proposed by the religions we've inherited.

Conflicts of existence

Spratlan alternates Eagleman's vignettes with a potpourri that includes a quote from the physicist Richard Feynman, three brief quotes from traditional religious texts, and poems by three American poets: Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich and A.R. Ammons. The selections ponder the conflicts and unities of existence and lead naturally to Eagleman's final vision of the afterlife as an endless recombination of the atoms that constitute every individual.

The title for Spratlan's cantata refers to the names the Greeks gave the morning and the evening star. Eventually, they discovered that the two opposites, Hesperus and Phosphorous, were one entity: the planet we now call Venus.

Spratlan's musical settings for this sprawling anthology achieve all the objectives of good settings: They create moods, magnify the impact of the words, and sometimes add effects that offer a commentary on the text.

God on a junket

Spratlan sets Eagleman's prose with a choral style that can best be compared to recitative. He maintains musical interest with sudden changes in pace and mood as well as imaginative instrumental accompaniments.

Spratlan's setting of Eagleman's second portrait of the afterlife contains a prime example of wry musical irony. Heaven has retained its outward charms, including "San Diego weather," but God (who is now a He) has disappeared, and the inhabitants have started wars over their explanations for His absence. One conflict sets "those who have concluded He never existed" against "those who have concluded He's on a romantic junket with His girlfriend."

Spratlan provides a strong choral setting for the description of the first side, then switches to a single tenor singing Gregorian chant for the reference to the Deity's holiday fling.

Cosmic cacophony

Hesperus Is Phosphorous is a joint commission of the Network for New Music and Donald Nally's new music chorus, The Crossing. So Spratlan had to work with a chamber chorus and a limited instrumental ensemble. In his pre-concert remarks, Spratlan noted that he likes to work with limits, and he employs the six musicians in his band with masterly inventiveness, throwing in solos and dashes of color that keep his philosophical variety show humming with developments.

In his setting for Ammons's ode to unity, to mention just one example, he creates a vast cosmic cacophony out of the single instrumental strands issuing from six instrumental voices.

Spratlan's musical inventiveness faltered at just one point, for this listener. His setting of Adrienne Rich's poem in praise of mankind's flawed nature was the only passage in which I felt the words could have stood alone, without the music.

Religious atheist?

Spratlan mentioned that he is himself a non-believer but said he included quotes from traditional religious texts partly because, like most of us, he treasures the great liturgical works we've inherited. Spratlan follows Eagleman's vision of eternal recombination with an appropriate quote from the Doxology: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen."

His ending melds two musical periods. Spratlan elaborates the "Amen," like most Baroque composers, and turns that final "So be it" into a modern version of the grand choral affirmation that concludes Handel's Messiah. Then he exits, quietly, with a single bell— echoing the kind of gentle, evocative ending Shostakovich employed in some of his best works.