On Sarah Kirkland Snider's Mass for the Endangered

Trinity Church Wall Street’s “Mass Re-Imaginings” project commissioned a set of composers to offer a twenty-first-century take on the traditional Mass. For her commission, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider turned to her longtime friend, the poet, writer, and songwriter Nathaniel Bellows, whose approach to language, in Snider’s estimation, is “elegant and timeless, lyrical and layered, yet it leaves room for the music to say something.” Together, they set out to create “a celebration of, and elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action.” Their project, then, was not sacred in the traditional sense. Snider explains:

The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.

Mass for the Endangered beautifully weaves together musical strands both ancient and contemporary. Having spent her formative years as a singer, Snider is versed in the traditions and forms of the choral repertoire and admits to being “fascinated by sacred music—its transcendent aspirations, and its ethereal and dramatic settings.” In developing her Mass, she wanted, “rather than consciously upend those traditions . . . to open the gates in my mind between centuries-old European vocal traditions and those of more recent American vernacular persuasion and write from a place where differing thoughts about line, text, form, and expression could co-exist.” Among the most beguiling moments is the opening of the Gloria. Where other sections bustle with rhythmic and contrapuntal activity, this Latin hymn unfolds reservedly—pristinely—for harp solo and upper voices. The harp’s cascading arpeggios establish an open, warm sonority, inside of which the voices trace a Phrygian chant-like melody. The text’s acclamations, now addressed to Nature—“we praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give thanks to you for your great glory”—feel fervent but humble and awed. If the Gloria is the most reverent bit of the Latin original in Snider’s reimagining, the Sanctus is the grandest and most exuberant. Here, too, Snider presents just the original Latin, but across a much vaster canvas. At “Heaven and earth are full of your [Nature’s] glory,” the upper voices’ overlapping arpeggio wingbeats evoke the ascent of a great flock of birds, or millions of migrating monarchs’ fluttering into Mexico; the syncopated patterns of lower voices and piano suggest the rumbling hooves of herds on the move. 

The instrumental material is unlike anything one might encounter elsewhere in the entire Mass repertoire. As a conductor, I’m fascinated by the process by which a two-dimensional score of paper and ink is transformed into a powerful but ephemeral three-dimensional sound object that pulses, breathes, and churns. Snider deftly deploys exceedingly specific dynamic indications and plays across varying rhythmic planes to create everything from moments of crystalline delicacy and stillness to pop-rock jams. Her decisions with respect to orchestration offer a brilliant display of the varied traits available in the instrumental menagerie and evoke the endlessly varied sounds of the forest, from floor to canopy and beyond. The woodwinds’ breath sets abuzz their cylinders of silver and grenadilla wood in high, shimmering clusters and quick-keyed chirrups. The marimbaist’s buoyant bong of rubber on rosewood, and heavenly harp tones, contrast with the scratchier earthy edge of the strings’ spruce and maple, pulsing from horse-hair bows drawn across tungsten and steel. At its busiest, the score bustles with the “quells and coos,” “cries and calls” invoked in its libretto. At its most serene, the simpler “drones and hums,” of one, two, or three notes suffice. Everywhere, the music feels at once ancient and modern, familiar and fresh.

While the project begins and ends with pleas for mercy and forgiveness in the Kyrie and Agnus Dei, respectively, it becomes most urgent and imperative in the Credo. There, as Wilfred Owen’s poems do against the Latin Requiem text in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Nathaniel Bellows’s poems both echo and implicate the Latin texts into which they’re interpolated. The Latin Credo professes belief in the supernatural—a holy spirit, the revivification of the dead, virgin birth, etc.—and awaits a post-Messianic “world to come.” Bellows’s verse extols not the supernatural and the world to come, but the natural and the world we now inhabit, whose fauna are disappearing. Admittedly, living as many of us do in a dense and artificial built environment, this disappearance may seem out of sight, or at least old news. At first glance, the concrete jungle erected around my Manhattan apartment appears to have obliterated all but the bedrock of Mannahatta, once prized by the Lenape for its glades and springs teeming with wildlife. And yet—I’m greeted with the cooing of doves and the hoots of an owl from the courtyard beyond my bedroom window. Recent years have seen intrepid oceanic mammals returning to spout and breach in our once-polluted harbor, and coyotes and hawks daring to den and nest in the manmade hills of Central Park and pre-war limestone “cliffs” that flank it. (I’d be remiss not to note our resilient subterranean Rodentia [rat] and Blattodea [roach] neighbors, here since time immemorial, who likewise exhibit the “stalwart, fearless, dauntless,” nature extolled in the libretto.) 

In the world beyond our immediate locale, the resilience of animalia continues to be tested. The 2022 Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund documents a devastating 69% drop on average in monitored populations of vertebrates globally since 1970. Setting out to create Mass for the Endangered, Snider and Bellows hoped: 

Our Mass will be an elegy for endangered animals, a Requiem for the not-yet-gone. We believe there is a wisdom to animals that extends far beyond what we as humans can comprehend. The idea would be to observe, attempt to understand, and honor these nearly departed species while striving to show the resonance of their otherworldly knowledge and the precarious nature of their place here on Earth. We feel that exploring these concepts in a framework of reverence and celebration, with a plea for mercy and forgiveness, could be very powerful and beautiful.

Indeed, since I first engaged with it in 2020, the beauty, intricacy, and compelling quality of this music, reflected in the beauty and intricacy of the natural world, has kept my eyes, ears, and heart hopeful. 

We believe in listen and wish,
And to be worthy of their gift 
This chance to look within ourselves
And change how we have lived.