Mass Appeal – Living Traditions

It was 2018 when David Hattner first proposed pairing Bruckner’s Mass in E minor with Stravinsky’s Mass in a project with Cappella Romana and Portland Youth Philharmonic, and I immediately recognized the rightness of it. Though separated by eighty years and vast stylistic differences, these works share deep connections. Both set the same Roman Catholic ordinary text. Both are scored for winds and brass without strings. They are sonically distinct, yet the underlying principles of their structure and musical content reveal more commonalities that we will see here. 

Both composers wrestled with how to honor tradition while creating something new. Bruckner faced criticism from conservative Catholics who found his masses too individual, too personal, too influenced by Wagner and modern trends. Stravinsky, after years away from the church, returned to his Russian Orthodox faith and created here what he called a “real Mass”—ascetic, ritualistic, uncompromising. Both might be called “holy fools” in their own way—religious artists willing to risk ridicule for their convictions. And each composer refused to follow conventions slavishly. As Bruckner himself wrote:

They want me to be different; I could be, but I must not. Out of thousands it was me to whom the loving God has given a talent; one day I will need to give an account of myself. How would the Lord God judge me if I followed others and not Him?

Both composers looked to the past, whether real or imagined, and allowed it to inform their own choices. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Predecessors get a vote. Both Bruckner and Stravinsky drew on Renaissance polyphony, Venetian polychoral traditions, and—in Stravinsky’s case—Slavic Orthodox chant. Yet neither composer produced mere conscious counterfeits of what came before. They created living works that could only exist because of the traditions from which they emerged.

Shared Values

For us, Cappella Romana’s vision is to explore music of the Christian East and West and to find in it glimmers of a common inheritance, Orthodox and Catholic, ancient and modern. Both of these masses embrace an ancient saying of the early church lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief. The liturgical text in each case receives reverent, clear treatment. Words shape the music rather than the other way around. What we pray is what is believed.

Musical repetition in both works creates ritual time, a sense of entering into something eternal. Bruckner transforms themes through intricate fugal development. Stravinsky employs static, unchanging ostinato—“stubborn” repetition without development. Sometimes they each repeat the text itself for emphasis. Stravinsky’s threefold “Lord, have mercy” might resonate with the Orthodox litanies he knew well, while the triple repetition of Kyrie and Agnus Dei phrases likewise mystically invokes the Holy Trinity.

The choice of winds and brass—no strings—creates ceremonial gravity and blends naturally with the human voice. For Stravinsky this departs from Orthodox tradition, which ordinarily prohibits instruments in worship. Yet even Orthodoxy makes exceptions: in the Ionian Islands, brass bands often accompany the Holy Friday funeral procession outdoors before the participants reenter the church and they set their instruments aside.

Stravinsky’s Mass

“Cold music that will appeal directly to the spirit” —Igor Stravinsky

The Greek poet George Seferis, whose poem «Άρνηση» (“Denial ”) was famously set to music by Mikis Theodorakis¹, wrote the preface to Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music. Required reading for me when I was an undergraduate, Poetics of Music still retains its power to challenge and inspire. Seferis writes that Stravinsky’s “most profound expression” lies not in words but in sound itself, offering listeners “catharsis” and “deliverance,” more than mere emotional release and rescue. These Greek terms—kathársis (cleaning) and lýtrosis (ransom through sacrifice) underscore how Stravinsky strips away what is inessential, sacrificing excess to deliver listeners from sentimentality, “cold music that will appeal directly to the spirit.” In the same vein of musical asceticism, Arvo Pärt would later say: “It is enough when a single note is beautifully played.” 

Stravinsky completed his mass between 1944 and 1948 in Los Angeles. It was one of few works of his not created on a commission; he seems to have had an internal need to write it, not only for himself, but to align it with serious liturgical use. 

Stravinsky achieves his spiritual directness through musical restraint, particularly the use of the the octatonic scale and polyvalency. The octatonic scale—alternating whole and half, or half and whole steps—is tonally ambiguous with eight possible tonal centers. It suggests something mysterious, beyond the physical realm. Listen especially in the Gloria at “qui tollis peccata mundi” (who takes away the sins of the world), where harmony neither progresses nor retreats, creating an eternal present of Christ’s sacrifice. 

Even with accompaniment, his Creed echoes those sung in Russian churches, yet he expands harmonic colors far beyond conventional Slavic chant, having done the same in his earlier a cappella setting of the Creed written in the 1930s, also sung to block chords. At “Et incarnatus est” (and was made incarnate), the otherworldly octatonic and earthly diatonic elements are present together—an aural icon of the mystery of the Incarnation: Christ fully divine and fully human, two natures without confusion.

Polyvalency—simultaneous presentation of multiple tonal centers—appears most strikingly in the Sanctus. Two solo voices sing quasi-Byzantine melodies in one tonal center while instruments occupy others, creating sonorities that conventional analysis cannot easily parse. These polytonal passages resonate with the ancient understanding of perichóresis (περιχώρησις), the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, to Whom we and the angels cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

Despite Stravinsky’s insistence that his Mass was free of external influence (he claimed it was an antidote to Mozart masses he called “sweets of sin”), his work clearly engages with tradition. The vocal lines often filter medieval Ars Nova polyphony through a modernist lens. The orchestration pays homage to polychoral music with its separate choirs of singers and winds and brass from Venice, which would become Stravinsky’s final resting place in 1971. 

Bruckner’s Mass in E minor

Anton Bruckner composed this Mass in 1866 for the dedication of Linz’s new Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Construction delays meant only a votive chapel stood completed, so he wrote it for outdoor performance with winds and brass—and no strings. He revised it in 1882, and we present that version today with a chamber ensemble appropriate for interior space.

Bruckner knew wind instruments well. Austrian “country masses” commonly employed winds drawn from municipal or military bands with local singers. But this is no simple country mass despite its folk-inspired orchestration. It demands much from singers and players: intricate polyphony and wild chromatic passages that require precise intonation and stamina.

The opening Kyrie—four-part unaccompanied sopranos and altos—immediately recalls Renaissance models. Bruckner controls consonance and dissonance as did Palestrina while expanding harmonies with Romantic chromaticism. The same music follows with tenors and basses before expanding to full choir with brass punctuation.

This Mass emerged during the Cecilian Movement, a Catholic reform initiative in German-speaking lands that advocated returning to Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony in the style of Palestrina. Reformers rejected recent modern church music (including Mozart and Beethoven) for adapting opera and concert conventions—those “sweets of sin” that Stravinsky also eschewed—that transformed liturgy into entertainment and had the potential of drawing more attention to artists than to sacred ritual. In our case, that ritual must be imagined since we must admit that our performance exists in a liminal space between actual ritual and concert experience. 

Bruckner’s relationship to the Cecilian Movement was complex. His boss, the Bishop of Linz who commissioned this Mass, strongly supported Cecilian goals. As a devout Catholic and initially sympathetic to the movement, Bruckner did study Gregorian chant and Palestrina and embraced the forms and values he found: liturgical appropriateness, corporate expression, and textual clarity in polyphonic treatment. Yet his harmonic language was veering far outside of Renaissance models, opening toward Wagner’s chromatic harmonies. This ruffled the feathers of some conservative Catholics: they viewed Bruckner’s masses with suspicion, seeing too much individual vision rather than selfless service. As I wrote about Josef Rheinberger and his Mass for Double Choir last season, Bruckner too found a synthesis between the seemingly competing forces of tradition and innovation. 

Likewise, choosing winds over strings was a clever Cecilian move—since strings suggested opera and symphony, not church. This choice also made the Mass more accessible: not every parish could afford an orchestra, and wind players cost less than string players since they were often municipal employees under a different union.

The Gloria gives winds prominent place, with choral lines resembling fanfare wind parts in their wide melodic leaps and triadic turns. Folk elements expand through modal harmony that evokes plainsong and pre-tonal polyphony, carrying archaic associations of timelessness. Yet the Gloria navigates harmonic territory that defies ordinary analysis, culminating in one of the choral canon’s most complex fugues—clearly honoring Bach while astonishingly departing into distant and ambiguous Wagnerian harmonies.

Like Stravinsky’s Creed, Bruckner’s follows liturgical convention with the priest intoning its first line “I believe in God.” Subsequent acclamations feature block chords, not unlike Stravinsky’s Slavic-informed treatment. But at “Et incarnatus est,” Bruckner allows for a moment of meditation through repetitions and counterpoint. At “Crucifixus” (and was crucified), plain declamation also yields to a more contemplative interlude. The outbursts at “Resurrexit” (and rose) and “et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum” (I expect the resurrection of the dead), with a sudden stop of rhetoric on the word “death,” are corporate proclamations. Yet one can’t help but hear Bruckner’s personal faith expressed as well. The creed after all is traditionally said in the first person, “I believe,” not “We believe.”  

The Sanctus begins as an elegant eight-part motet, opening with winds into a forceful paean to the heavenly realm. Here, even more explicitly than in the Stravinsky, we hear echoes of Venetian separated choirs of singers and brass. The Agnus Dei opens subdued—choir in low unison—but quickly exploits the soprano range with a high B-flat crying for mercy and peace. In a gesture in which time nearly stops, its sober conclusion stretches out the final word “pacem,” “peace.” Grant us peace indeed.

Living Tradition

In pairing these masses together, we continue our mission to explore music in this tradition as something alive, not static. Stravinsky perhaps expressed this best in his Poetics of Music: “A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present. Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants.”

Both Bruckner and Stravinsky shared the impulse to conserve the best of tradition while creating something new. Bruckner synthesized the counterpoint of Palestrina with Romantic harmony while meeting liturgical needs. Stravinsky merged Orthodox and Catholic traditions with modern, astringent harmony and counterpoint. Each found way of uniting past and present as a viable creative path. True freedom comes through tradition, not against it, with the result of that freedom giving us today the possibility of glimpsing the sublime.

1. Cappella Romana will perform selections of the Requiem by Theodorakis November 2025. ↩︎