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Writing music for sacred spaces and tough topics
A chat with Melissa Dunphy - VS Ep8
Publication: National Lutheran Choir
February 5, 2024
Writing music for sacred spaces and tough topics - A chat with Melissa Dunphy - VS Ep8
National Lutheran Choir
Transcript:
"The beautiful thing I think about choral music is that you can approach topics that have been politicized to the point where everyone’s on a hair trigger. You can approach them in a way that cuts through that initial knee-jerk reaction and makes you sit with the feelings and think about it with your heart."
Dr. Jennaya Robinson: Well welcome, Melissa Dunphy, composer and activist and all around fantastic human being. I came upon your music, it must have been probably in 2018 or 19. I was looking through music by women and trying to look for composers that I didn’t - I wasn’t as familiar with, and I came upon your website. And the first thing that caught my eye was I was trying to buy the sample pieces of music that were on your website, and that it says that these things are for free. Yeah I fell in love with your music because it was so easy to get. It was accessible. And then I saw all these pieces of music that really were about relevant themes.Dr. Melissa Dunphy: I write about things that I am passionate about which I think, you know all artists should make art about the things that they’re passionate about. I have this faith that if I’m passionate about it, somewhere someone else out there will also be passionate about it.
Robinson: You also have a pretty big catalog of music that would be appropriate for like church choirs and sacred spaces. You take the text from the Bible and you very carefully select what translation that you’re going to use or what edition of the Bible that you use for those texts?
Dunphy: Well, first of all, I sort of feel like I pick texts that I think are very relevant, that I have very strong feelings about. Before I was a composer, I actually was a Shakespearean actor, and so I am, you know, very comfortable with King-James-Bible-kind of texts. But at the same time, I think that if I choose a translation - first of all it has to be in the public domain, which surprisingly enough, some of your viewers and listeners might not know this, but most translations of the bible that are very modern are not public domain. But also I don’t want to necessarily go back to King James text because I think that sets up that it’s not relevant to modern audiences. So I try to find texts that are in the vernacular particularly if I’m writing for American choirs. You know, what’s something that’s relatable to American listeners.
Robinson: Some of your music is wickedly hard. I mean - really, it’s fantastic I mean but it is pro choir level for sure. But then, you know, I was delighted to see that one of the pieces that we doing in January where we’re bringing together different Church choirs and community folks is really accessible.
Dunphy: There is an attitude in academia, if you write something that’s difficult, it proves that you’re smart. If all contemporary composers who’ve gone through this training and internalized this attitude are writing music that can only be sung by pro choirs or only performed by people who went to, you know, top conservatories, then you know students, intermediate players, amateurs, community musicians, will only ever play the stuff in the canon that is actually accessible to them you know? As a little kid learning music, I learned a lot of Bach and Mozart. There was not a lot of contemporary stuff on the program. I only got to that later. Why? Because most of that stuff is a lot harder to play. Why do I have this attitude in my head if I write something that, you know is quote unquote “simple” to play, there is literally an impulse engendered through years of academic training that’s like “Oh I have to complicate this in some way to like make it more difficult so that people don’t look at my music and think that I didn’t have the creativity to make this more challenging.” And ever since then, I mean, it was a really sort of, you know lightning bolt moment in my head where I went, “it doesn’t have to be this way.” I also think genuinely that writing music for a community chorus, a church choir, can actually be more challenging for composers than writing for a choir who literally will make anything that you write happen and sound amazing. It’s been really rewarding to write that music, to have people - a wider audience of people singing my music, and to have, you know, people who don’t sing a lot of contemporary music because of that difficulty level engage with something that I’ve written for them.
Robinson: You really don’t shy away from writing about things that I think might make upper midwest audiences squirm a little bit.
Dunphy: I mean art is supposed to make us a little bit uncomfortable sometimes. I think that the way that I approach political topics is not to like browbeat people into submission, or to like deliberately try to make them really mad about an issue, because I don’t think that that’s constructive necessarily for anyone. I hope that the topics that I choose and the tack that I choose to take is like broadly pretty universal, you know? Especially if we’re talking about the message in the New Testament, the Golden Rule, and what Christians - Christian, you know, theology and doctrine encourages people to do. The beautiful thing I think about choral music is that you can approach topics that have been politicized to the point where everyone’s on a hair trigger. You can approach them in a way that cuts through that initial knee-jerk reaction and makes you sit with the feelings and think about it with your heart. I think more than any other instrumentation or genre of music, choral music has that ability to stop conflict and dissonance and make us sit with it. You know, it’s like even if you’re not listening to the words the first time you hear it, they’re like seeping in at some subconscious level and rewiring your brain in some way so that’s really powerful to me. Because I think maybe of the polarization and the politicization of everything in our society, like literally everything is politicized, you know? Coffee is politicized. Like, what is going on? Where like the tenets - the pillars - you know, the morality that is preached in the Bible, are all so politicized, you know. So when you say that we want to be accepting of everything when Jesus very explicitly talks about income inequality as being a bad thing. It’s literally, I mean, forcing you to examine your privilege, you know. When Jesus tells a rich man like “give everything to the poor, then you’ve become a good person, you can enter Heaven,” that is so analogous to us thinking about the morality of our economy. I think it’s important for us as a society to think about that discomfort, so I’m going to set that to music so that you all have to think about it for three and a half minutes while the choir sings.
Robinson: I love it.
Dunphy: And I’m gonna make it kind of catchy, so it sticks in your head, and all that good stuff. But you know, it’s like, these are also the messages that when I was a kid were ingrained in me, the parts that I chose to sort of take away from my education and go, you know, “yeah, I really, really believe in that.”
Robinson: Well it has been such a pleasure to talk to you, and you know, it’s always so refreshing to talk to somebody that you feel like you can get to the real stuff about life. And you’re so transparent about just being able to talk about really important issues in a way that is completely disarming and not so intense that you’re nervous. It’s just, yeah it’s great to speak with you today.
Dunphy: Such a pleasure to talk to you, thank you so much for inviting me.
Robinson: If you are interested in being able to hear more of what Melissa and I talked about today, please visit our website at NLCA.com to be able to hear the entire conversation.