Artist of the Month

Click here to return to directory of artists.

---

April 2008: Richard Prior

Award-Winning Emory Composer and Conductor Presents Major Choral/Orchestral Work

The universal themes of love, life, grief, and loss are brought into focus through the musical lens of Richard Prior’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated work, Stabat Mater, performed by the combined forces of the Emory Symphony Orchestra and University Chorus April 17-18 at 8 p.m. (free) in the Schwartz Center, Emerson Concert Hall. Composed in 2000 while teaching at Oklahoma State University, Dr. Prior interwove the traditional text of the Stabat Mater, the Medieval Latin narrative of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, with contemporary poems in English by mothers relating their experiences of loss through adverse circumstances to create a highly lyrical and intensely dramatic work.

Prior’s musical training began in his native England, where he received a BA with high honors from Leeds University, and an AMusD degree in conducting and composition from Nottingham University. Following his 1988 debut at London’s Westminster Abbey, Prior’s music has been widely performed and broadcast in Europe and North America with works also featured at national conventions and international festivals. His choral works maintain a presence with choirs in the U.S. and in cathedrals across the United Kingdom. Prior has served as the Director of Orchestral Studies at Emory University since 2004. He is also the Director of Chamber Ensembles and conductor for the Emory Symphony Orchestra and the Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra. Prior was able to take time from his many rehearsals to give some background and insight into his 2001 Pulitzer-nominated work, Stabat Mater.

Q: Where did Stabat Mater premiere? Why did you decide to perform it this spring at Emory?
A: The piece was commissioned by the Director of Choral Studies at Southeastern Louisiana University and premiered in 2000 at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Covington, LA. Their performance venue happened to be this huge gothic cathedral with people running around in robes. It is definitely the last thing you’d expect to find in the middle of Louisiana. It was actually Eric Nelson [Emory’s Director of Choral Studies] who selected to perform Stabat Mater this spring because I make a very conscious effort to keep my two career tracks as a composer and conductor separate. I’m very resistant to programming my own pieces with my own ensembles because it seems incredibly self-serving. However, it’s fantastic to have the opportunity to have a work of this scale done. It’s one thing to prepare a piece for chamber, orchestra, or stand-alone choir, but the forces needed for this are a chorus, symphony, and soloists. The larger the production is, the more complicated it gets as a proposal.

Q: Were you influenced or inspired by previous settings of the Stabat Mater? If so, which ones?
A: Creatively I have a tendency to not listen to anything or get myself pumped up about another piece in the same genre when I’m writing. I don’t want to hear anything that might distract me from what I’m trying to get to. However, from the age of eight right through to when I came to the states around twenty-four, I grew up surrounded by the English choral tradition, which eventually becomes steeped in the blood. We were exposed to an incredibly broad wealth of choral music, which is now, unfortunately, a tradition that is dying because of the change in focus in worship practices. Ultimately, my work is an indirect expression of that background.

Q: What is your process as a composer?
A: As with many composers I have different ways of approaching different projects. Sometimes I will sit and improvise at the piano. Other times I actually have the sound of the orchestration already in my head and the worst thing to do is take it to the piano because you start to go down avenues that weren’t part of the original vision. Overall, it becomes an incredibly absorbing process, especially with larger projects, because you have all of the orchestration, melodies, and different ways of organizing the structure running through your head constantly. That’s the point where you tend to be extremely unavailable for coherent conversation and it’s generally a big mistake to drive. There are so many components you need to control. There is also an aspect of constant variation: I’ll come up a phrase and then I will, in the manner of a chess player, take it down many different paths and come up with as many permutations as I can. Eventually, you end up using several of those permutations, not just one. It’s really just exploring the potential for the material to its highest possible level or degree.

Q: Why did you choose to work on this text? What connection do you have with it?
A: The initial inspiration for the piece was that I had reached a point in my life where I had experienced the deaths of colleagues, relatives, and even students. You just get to a point where you know people who die, and, to me, this was a way of working out some of my deep personal grief at the time. What I did was combine the traditional Latin text with contemporary English poems. The connection is that I tried to separate the Latin text from the religious or Judeo-Christian message because, fundamentally, what you’re talking about is a mother witnessing the suffering of a child, which I think is an incredibly powerful image. It doesn’t have to be connected to a religion in any way. It’s just a human concept. The poems I added tapped into similar themes of loss through conflict or through adverse circumstances. I found a contemporary resonance with that message because, no matter who you are or who you think you are, death is a part of the experience that defines life.

Q: What are some of the challenges of preparing and performing a work of this dimension, especially as both the composer and the conductor?
A: As a composer it is very important to write music that engages not just the listener, but also the performer. I strive to create sufficient technical challenges and artistic interest for every member of the performing ensemble, from the solo soprano to the second clarinetist. In that way you are engaging the players as well as the audience in the performance. Logistically there is the challenge of preparing a large chorus and an orchestra, which of course happens separately, and then fitting all that together. This is the annually the largest collaboration of the season. Effectively we’ve got approximately 300 people on stage performing an hour’s worth of music. The practical and logistical issues of pulling all of that together would be the same, regardless of whether I composed the work or not. In terms of preparation, working on this piece is really no different than any of the other things we prepare during the course of the year. The only difference is that the composer is actually standing in front of the ensemble, so when questions arise such as, “I wonder what the composer meant here,” I can provide an answer. What was wonderful in the collaboration with Eric was that he found details and relationships in the piece that I had not noticed because I was so absorbed in its creation. I’m so wrapped up in inventing the unique gestural language and harmonic structure of the work that those relationships often develop naturally outside of my conscious effort. So one of the great joys of working with Eric was seeing him become genuinely excited about discovering unique connections in the score that were not necessarily intentional.

Q: What can the audience expect from the performance?
A: A journey, an experience, an emotional resonance, and a connection. Visually, I always think that these collaborations are spectacular. It’s a beautiful hall and you have this mass of bodies up there that are all unified in this moment of musical expression. People always forget about the visual aspect of live performances. Everybody knows Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, so why bother go to the concert? The difference is that you get to see the music happen. You see the engagement in the players, or, for a choral piece, you see the facial expressions of the singers as they emotionally project the text. You can’t and never will get that off of a CD, and it will never be the same on a DVD as in live performance.

Edited by Jessica Moore
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory

Return to Top

---