Peace and Good in Christ!
Songs From Solitude was birthed in the Spring of 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, social distancing, sheltering in place, and isolation became the new normal for millions. For monastics it became a time without the many guests and retreatants to whom we minister. It became a time to go deeper into our “cloistered” monastic life. This was an unsuspected blessing.
I had already heard a call from God in 2019 to take a sabbatical from outside ministry in 2020. So, I was already prepared for this monastic solitude.
Songs From Solitude was an unexpected surprise in this time of monastic enclosure. In the midst of this more intense solitude songs began to flow. Ancient texts upon which I had meditated for decades found new melody and tone.
Under the pandemic restrictions I couldn’t produce them with choir or orchestra. Plus, the economic limitations brought with streaming and digital have reduced recorded music from an art form to a utility to augment live performance, much like a calling card at best. So, recording budgets nowadays are severely restricted.
After considering my options I discerned to simply record my guitar and voice in my hermitage studio, and create a “choir” from my own overdubbed voice. This is usually how I lay out songs anyway, so it was not new to me. The result is something sparse, yet harmonically rich and tonally suggestive.
In my personal time in hermitage I had spent years and decades steeped in ancient liturgical and devotional texts. A close encounter with death a few years back brought these texts intimately near as I could only muster familiar phrases or tongues through which to pray in that holy of holy place of immediacy with heavenly worship. These familiar ancient texts became the libretto of this new musical piece.
The Come Let Us Kneel Down comes from Prime in the Coptic daily prayers of the hours, called the Agpeya. The Trisagion (Thrice Holy) comes from a vision of a child of heavenly worship in the Christian East, and originated from the stational liturgies while processing to Divine Liturgy. It is also used in the West’s Chaplet of Divine Mercy. The Cherubic Hymn is used at the Great ( Angelic) Entrance of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy.
The typical Mass parts ( Lord Have Mercy, Glory to God, Holy, and Lamb of God) are familiar in the West, but are also used in the East in their own way. Jesus, I Trust in You comes from the Divine Mercy Chaplet from St. Faustina in Poland, which is on the border of East and West. O My Jesus comes from a vision of Mary in the later Fatima setting of the Marian Rosary in the Christian West. These last two are particularly sweet and childlike.
I also used musical settings that imply both the Christian East and the West. The eastern tones employ a standard mid eastern scale, with an underlying drone so common in Byzantine chant, but with a western and modern twist. The western tones employ everything from Spanish to folk, various styles of classical, and even a touch of jazz. Sometimes these are clear in particular songs exclusively, and sometimes they are integrated together into one song. Listen for the integrations.
To be clear, I do not expect my settings to be used liturgically in either the East or West, but for different reasons. The East used unaccompanied chant almost exclusively, and I simply don’t fit into the milieu and culture of Catholic liturgical music. But, some may spill over anyway.
This setting of these songs is being released digitally. I might perhaps release it in some hard copy media on a limited basis. And I might even “produce all or something of these if the opportunity arises. That might be fun!
So, I pray you enjoy these Songs From Solitude. I pray they help you in your solitude, and empower you to go forth into the world at the right time and in the right way with a renewed power of the Holy Spirit in Christ and the Church.
CREDITS
Produced by John Michael Talbot
Mixed by John Michael Talbot & Brent King
Mastered by Brent King
Cover Art Michael Zabrocki
Cover Photo John Cotton
© ℗ 2020
Troubadour for the Lord
350 CR 248,
Berryville, AR 72616
www.JohnMichaelTalbot.com
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