Wolf calls. Birdsong. Whale Music. Not what you'd expect to hear in a church, but that is exactly what will be heard at Grace Lutheran Church in Eganville on April 25^th when the Ottawa Valley Music Festival presents For the Beauty of the Earth, a choral celebration of nature that will feature a performance of Paul Winter's Missa Gaia (The Earth Mass).

 

Is nature divine? Is it blasphemous to celebrate a mass dedicated to the Earth? These are some of the questions raised by the performance of Missa Gaia.

 

The Earth Mass was commissioned by the Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The composer, Paul Winter, first conceived the idea when he was listenting to a sermon about our responsibility to the environment. “I wanted to hear a truly contemporary mass. I envisioned a celebration that was both ecumenical and ecological, one that would embrace all the voices of the Earth. I wanted to feel the earth-power of African and Brazilian percussion as a complement to the serene voices of the choir. As I listened to the impassioend words of the sermon, the title came to me: Earth Mass.”

 

The name “Missa Gaia” is a combination of the Latin “missa” for mass and the Greek name for Mother Earth, “Gaia”; it acknowledges the “Gaia hypothesis”: the theory that all living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as a single living entity, endowed with faculties and power far beyond its constituent parts.

 

It follows in the long tradition of liturgical music, from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Bach, Haydn and Mozart. It is structured the same way as a typical sung mass but with the additon of the interweaving of the sounds of nature with the music and voices. . 

 

The name “Missa Gaia” is a combination of the Latin “missa” for mass and the Greek name for Mother Earth, “Gaia”; it acknowledges the “Gaia hypothesis”: the theory that all living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as a single living entity, endowed with faculties and power far beyond its constituent parts.