Output details

Misa de Corpus Christi [Corpus Christi Mass]

This full-length mass for chorus and orchestra has a radically different status from other works in my current output. As much as it exists as a work in its own right, the essence of Misa de Corpus Christi lies in its status as the focus of an ambitious youth music project, its generation of an event, and its articulation of a complex cultural identity.

Misa has an unconventional genesis. An earlier, now lost, version was given its debut performances in Bolivia and Argentina in 1978, and was widely discussed as a landmark in Bolivian music – the first large-scale composition to channel sounds of Andean folklore through the symphonic-choral medium. Its continuing salience in the cultural memory led to a clamour of demands from members of a younger generation to stage the piece again some decades later. However, I had destroyed the original score, regarding it as a piece of juvenilia – a rash judgement, given the cultural impact evident in the weight of demand from those seeking to mount it again. Hence I determined to recompose the piece, starting from a patchy set of extant materials, to create a new incarnation that would keep faith with the spirit of the original, that would meet my own more stringent expectations of myself as a mature composer, and that would enthuse a new generation of young musicians in an ambitious performance project.

A fuller account of this backstory, and of the composition and performances of the 2010 Misa can be found in the accompanying PowerPoint slides. The impact of the educational project around the work and of the resulting performances is described in the associated impact case study (REF3b).