A Choral Hit Man

The oldest musical instrument is hot again. From chant mania to a cappella pop, from art songs to large-scale choral works, the human voice is staking fresh claims on our musical imagination after a couple of centuries of comparative neglect and condescension in the musical world.

“There is nothing I love more than the sound of the human voice and ensembles of human voices,” says composer Morten Lauridsen. “The voice is the original instrument and the most expressive. The choral sound is dearest to my heart.”

His affection has not gone unrequited. Choirs buy upward of 150,000 copies of his scores every year now; his motet “O Magnum Mysterium” has had more than 3,000 performances and 20 recordings in fewer than five years, and this evening the Los Angeles Master Chorale performs his “Mid-Winter Songs” for the third time.

“The fact that the Master Chorale is doing the ‘Mid-Winter Songs’ brings it full circle for me, in a way,” Lauridsen says. “That particular piece was written on a commission from USC to celebrate its centennial, and exactly 20 years ago at this time we were having meetings to plan the project.

“It was premiered with a very involved piano accompaniment in 1981 by the USC Chamber Singers under Rodney Eichenberger, and at that concert was [conductor] Robert Duerr. He commissioned an orchestral version, which he premiered with his Pasadena Chamber Orchestra in 1983. Some of the Master Chorale people were at that concert, and they brought the piece to Roger Wagner, who did it with the Master Chorale in 1985,” he says.

“Then his successor John Currie repeated the piece in 1990, which gave me an opportunity to do some revision. I eliminated the sixth movement and extended the fifth movement, giving the orchestra another chance to sing on its own. And now the Master Chorale has recorded it and is performing it with its third conductor, Paul Salamunovich.”

Lauridsen became composer-in-residence with the Master Chorale in 1994, and the ongoing relationship has produced a remarkable body of music. Much of it has been recorded on “Lux Aeterna,” a CD released last year and nominated for a 1998 best choral performance Grammy.

A deeply personal meditation on themes of light, the title work has resonated powerfully with many listeners, who have inundated Lauridsen with letters and posted moving comments to Web sites such as Amazon.com. The album has remained a strong seller in a field little-accustomed to popular hits--when KUSC-FM (91.5) offered autographed copies as a pledge-drive bonus, Lauridsen had to sign 1,700 copies to fill the demand.

“My relationship with the Master Chorale has proved so fruitful,” Lauridsen says. “I’ve been listening to this chorus for many, many years, and to this conductor, and I try to write to their strengths. Paul is an acknowledged expert on Gregorian chant and a master of choral sound, and I’ve tried to give him pitches right down the middle of the plate that he can hit out of the park. The choral sound that has been achieved on this album is simply magnificent.”

“This is an unbelievably happy relationship,” Salamunovich says. “It is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, because this guy is going to keep me famous, putting my name on his scores. He has captured the choral world.

“At our 1994 Christmas concert, when I premiered his ‘O Magnum Mysterium,’ I turned to the audience and said, ‘This text is synonymous with [a setting by] the Renaissance master Tomas Luis de Victoria. Tonight you are going to hear its 20th century counterpart, which I predict is going to become a choral classic.’ And it has.”

“ ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ was commissioned by Master Chorale board member Marshall Rutter for that Christmas concert as an anniversary gift to his wife. I knew exactly the text I wanted to set,” Lauridsen recalls. “I knew every-one would think of Victoria, but I thought, ‘Let’s step up to the plate and take our best swing.’ ”

As you might gather, Lauridsen is a baseball fan. He played every year while growing up in Portland, Ore., where he was an avid follower of the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League. He began piano lessons at an early age, and then took up the trumpet, favoring jazz and Broadway composers.

“I took no music at all in my first year at Whitman College,” Lauridsen says. “But that summer I was a lookout for the Forest Service, in a hut up on stilts south of Mt. St. Helens, essentially alone for 10 weeks. It was a period of intense introspection, and I decided that I was kidding myself, that I needed to be in music in some way.

“So I went back the next year and took every music course I could lay my hands on. I sang in the choir and got my piano playing up to a fairly high level, but I didn’t think I had the temperament to be a performer. So I came down to USC to sort it out.”

That was in 1963. Lauridsen drove south in a ’53 Buick and essentially walled himself off at USC, studying scores and composing under the guidance of Halsey Stevens. He stayed on to do graduate work, and now, at 55, he’s chairman of the University of Southern California composition department.

A soft-spoken but gregarious man, Lauridsen looks like a slightly less bushy version of Brahms, one of his compositional heroes. (It was Lauridsen who suggested the pairing with Brahms for this evening’s program.) He is an herbal-tea-and-handcrafts kind of guy, although he also drives a red sports car with vanity plates that read DIR8-ON, after his best-selling setting of Rilke’s “Dirait-on” (So They Say).

“I really enjoy working with my hands,” Lauridsen says. He has reworked much of his 70-year-old house in the Hollywood Hills, where he lives with his wife and three sons. He built an upper deck studio with a panoramic view, and as a change from “long hours sitting at a desk or piano,” he has taken on another construction project during his summers. In 1975, Lauridsen bought a ramshackle general store on one of the San Juan Islands. Every summer since, he goes up to Washington and works on turning the place into a second home, reachable only by the thrice-weekly mail boat or private boats or planes.

“I keep my summertime very unspoiled. I think this island centers me,” the composer says. “I generally go alone--my three sons join me later as their schedules permit. I go with a pile of books and the tools I need to work on my house. It is a chance to reflect on where I’ve been and to think about my next project. I take long walks, make some tea, read some poetry. There’s nothing like a pod of orcas going by, and the primeval sound they make.”

*

Poetry is Lauridsen’s second great love, and another reason why he favors the voice in his work. He has amassed a large library, prowling bookstores for signed and first editions of poetry, and it is always a text that fires his imagination and shapes the styles and forms of his music.

“I am constantly urging my listeners to read poetry. Read it every day,” the composer says. “There are so many unfortunate distractions in our life, and poetry is one of the great antidotes to that. You will be enriched and enlightened.”

Lauridsen is reluctant to divulge much about his next piece, beyond that it will probably be based on Spanish poems--he is reading Neruda now--and, of course, purposefully crafted for Salamunovich and the Master Chorale.

“It is important to me that my music be communicative,” he says. “I choose texts very carefully--Rilke, Lorca, Graves, sacred texts centuries old. These are words that communicate to me and touch me very deeply; I become part of the poetry. It is my job in setting these texts to music, to complement the poetic idea, which is why all of my cycles are so different.

“I am not writing in a vacuum--composition is an art that is meant to be heard and performed. I want to make music that makes a connection with my audience, that is gracious for the singers and the conductor, and that makes a difference in people’s lives.” *

“MID-WINTER SONGS,” Los Angeles Master Chorale, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Date: Today, 7:30 p.m. Prices: $7-$50. Phone: (213) 365-3500.