Andrzej Pietrewicz - #8

A Closer Listen

Andrzej Pietrewicz continues to challenge common assumptions of how sacred music can sound.  All too often, devotional albums are so safe that they dilute the creativity of the Creator.  This Toronto composer knows that awe comes from the unexpected, and that the holiest of experiences contain a level of surprise. Caleb Yono’s cover art draws the listener in, while Pietrewicz’s music keeps the listener intrigued.

Over the course of eight releases, the composer has shown remarkable growth, transitioning from early ensemble-based music to texture-based music.  The opening “Invocation” contains multitudes of chimes astride the shore, melded to the tolling of spire-like bells.  One thinks of loaves and fishes dividing or the fracturing of light upon the water.  “To perceive you in all things” and “To perceive you in all people” – the two titles part of a Pietrewicz poem, the theme central to Buddhism – might be made more specific: to perceive you in all sounds.  Field recordings and music meet, but the results border on the atonal.  Has the balance been upset, or the listener’s way of thinking?  A light cluster of voices washes up on shore and is swept away.  The bells return on a louder wave of party conversation: not quite babble or Babel.  As the volume increases, one wonders, might all sounds, and juxtapositions of sounds, be considered holy?

The theory is put to the test on “Living waters,” the album’s distinct center, in which the words of the Song of Songs and St. John of the Cross intertwine with electronic tones and field recordings.  The connection between the sensual and the spiritual is well-established (just read the Song of Songs!), yet despite its songs of yearning, contemporary Christian music tends to sidestep such associations.  Linking the physical to the spiritual, Pietrewicz soon incorporates the sounds of dancers on a hard wood floor and the supplication of breath.

“Presence of the spirit” is the boldest piece, as it exhales the ecstasy of spiritual rapture, but without context might be perceived in more earthly terms.  The church fathers grow uneasy, preferring the chant of “Presence in darkness and light.”  But if the light in you is darkness, how terribly dark it will be.  In the album finale “A new heaven and a new earth,” Pietrewicz  jumps forward to Revelation but backward to #6, the French text of “The New Jerusalem” spoken in English, a slow yet vital Pentecost, the opposite of Babel, an inversion of expectation.

And yet, despite its forward trajectory, as the album ends it wraps back around to its beginning, suggesting that not only linear time, but cyclical.  There are entry points for many major religions heard here, perhaps not only “to perceive you in all things” but “in all faiths,” the perception of a third, or in this case fourth or even fifth eye.  (Richard Allen)