“Passion, Lament, Glory”: Baroque Music and Modern Social Justice Resonances

Abstract

Abstr Abstract actBaroque religious music was composed and performed to stimulate devotion as well as the inspire passion through the theatricality of the religious ritual including the processional arrangements which worked in tandem with the performance practices based on strong emotional delivery. The current project aimed to re-imagine historical emotional affect through a pasticcio performance of Baroque works focused on the Easter Passion and Resurrection delivering the narrative with enactment. The project was also conceived to deliver broader social justice messages allied to displaced and misunderstood peoples of different religious and cultural backgrounds. In this paper, the audience is invited to spectate a performance of Passion, Lament, Glory, staged at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne just before Easter 2017. They are invited to share in the background to the work and read about audience responses to the live performance. These responses are reflected upon in terms of the empathic, cathartic and applied outcomes of the performance on the audience. K Ke eywor ywords: ds: Baroque, passion, emotion, compassion Aims and Ov Aims and Overview erviewThe performance explored in this paper aimed to impact its audiences by stimulating a deep emotional response and critical reflection on some specific aspects of the inequities in society. Its focus was racial and religious conflict and persecution as represented through the narrative of the Passion of Christ. Further to this, the work coincidentally aimed to re-invigorate aspects of musical and theatrical rhetoric stemming from the baroque repertoire that comprised the performance materials. It was a practice-led research project in which the current author, as artistic director, worked with the designer and cast in the development of the staging of the work, and the musical director in the delivery of the music. As this paper will reveal, the cast worked with a historical and modern social justice agenda underpinning their dramaturgical work, and also engaged historically-informed music performance practices. The audience, by contrast, revealed a range of responses to the work. Some were acutely aware of the modern parallels between the Passion of Christ and the religious persecutions and conflicts of modern society. For many, the visceral power of the performance itself touched them, and reported being moved to tears at several points. Another group was mainly affected by the 'beauty' of baroque music. There were some who were upset by having to queue to get into the performance. The reader is asked to reflect on these different

Music and Religion: Trends in Recent English-Language Literature (2015–2021)

“…This medical/therapy focused literature covers a wide variety of ontological and/or philosophical approaches to care and practice, including empathy (Davidson 2017;dos Santos and Brown 2021), interfaith/interethnic dialogue (Boyce-Tillman 2018; Gilboa and Salman 2019), equity and conflict transformation (Gottesman 2016), and inclusion (Boyce-Tillman 2016). Some of these and other studies report on the usefulness or prevalence of a particular therapeutic ontology.…”