VONNEGUT: REQUIEM

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC”
Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country

 In 1985, Kurt Vonnegut attended the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem and was so shocked when he read the English translation, he stayed up half the night rewriting it. He referred to his new version of the Requiem as a secular humanist paraphrase of "the Council of Trent monstrosity.”

THE WORLD PREMIERE

Voces Novae secured the rights to the Vonnegut requiem text and commissioned eight nationally and internationally acclaimed composers to set portions of the text to new music for chamber choir and instruments. See below for more about the composers.

The world premiere was performed twice on May 11 and 12, 2019 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington. Among the hundreds of attendees was the author’s daughter, Nanette Vonnegut, and seven of the eight composers.

Read the press release (12/17/2018)

Read the commemorative program >>

Kurt Vonnegut @ 100

NOTUS performed the Requiem again in 2022, the centennial year of Vonnegut’s birth, featuring Carolann Buff, Jason H. Nam, Eric M. Smedley, and Susan Swaney (conductors), Sara Fruehe (bassoon), Howard Klug (clarinet), Roger Roe (oboe).

Where to listen

For conductors

The Project

After securing the rights to Vonnegut’s witty, thought-provoking requiem text, Voces Novae rolled out the project over several years.

  • We commissioned eight nationally recognized composers to create short pieces to portions of the text.

  • The composers were chosen for their connection to Voces Novae, for their ability to relate to Vonnegut’s trademark irreverent reverence, and for gender parity among the eight composers.

  • Each composer created a piece of three to five minutes. The complete Vonnegut: Requiem takes about 40 minutes to perform.

  • Since Vonnegut also created an alternate text to Stravinsky’s chamber work, A Soldier’s Tale, we invited the composers to incorporate some of the instruments from that work – thereby creating a clever pairing for subsequent performances and the right amount of continuity for the set.

  • We foresee a future for these pieces to be used individually or together by community, school, and church choirs. The composers have collaborated to create a unified edition of the complete work. For more information, contact Susan Swaney at sswaney@indiana.edu.

The Composers

Read more about each composer:

The REVIEW

'Vonnegut: Requiem' — Strange notion brings brilliant result

By Peter Jacobi H-T Reviewer May 14, 2019

I doubted but shouldn’t have.

After all, Susan Swaney developed this project. This creative, energetic, and musically gifted artistic director of Voces Novae almost always sends her community chamber choir into challenging territory, yet manages, through sheer will and belief, to pull it off. This one, however, seemed like a journey too far and in dubious direction.

But in two performances given over the weekend at the Unitarian Universalist Church, she, her undaunted choir, and an instrumental ensemble of six put a finish to her project by attracting enough folks to the church, filling it, and leaving after reacting to what they experienced with extended, cheers-and-whoops-punctuated standing ovations. Leaving probably also with lasting memories of having been part of a premiere occasion that will continue to resonate within them: their introduction to the “Vonnegut: Requiem.”

The narrative leading to the weekend began more than 30 years ago when Kurt Vonnegut, the son of Indiana that became an honored international literary figure, attended the world premiere in New York City’s St. Thomas Church of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version of the centuries-old Roman Catholic Mass for the dead.

Vonnegut loved the music. But this very secular, freethinking humanist, and at-the-time non-believer hated the words.

As he put it: “The expressions on the faces of all the superb musicians who performed … that night, and especially that of the enraptured boy soprano, had us believing that God loved us and that death was something to look forward to, when their messages decoded were as humane as ‘Mein Kampf ‘ by Adolf Hitler.” Those words, he said, were shaped by decree of the Council of Trent in 1570, “a badly attended, acrimonious gathering of Catholic churchmen and their notable patrons who hoped to restore some sort of unity to Christendom after so many worshippers, following the lead of Martin Luther, had doubted the spiritual supremacy of the Pope in Rome.”

He pledged to do a rewrite. He did, one that, as Vonnegut put it, had words “more sane and comforting to those with death on their minds.”

Conductor Swaney chanced to hear about the rewrite through her husband, Ian Woollen, long-time friend of author Dan Wakefield, who at the time was editing Vonnegut’s letters. She set her mind to doing something with her discovery, moved into discussions and negotiations with locally connected composers she knew or whose music she knew. Eight expressed interest and set to work, having divided the sections of the Mass among them.

To me, dividing the creation of a single work into a work by a gaggle of creators simply invites trouble and failure. But Swaney’s dreamy scheme works. It works brilliantly. True, those requiem Masses that have had successful lives in concert venues — such as ones by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Faure, and Durufle — are successful because they achieve the requirement, as has the Vonnegut version, of that broadly expressive musical range to complement the variety of content covered by sections of the Mass. But note that in each prior case, a single mind and talent fulfilled the needed range.

That differs markedly from setting eight individuals on personal paths to musically interpret his or her portion of a collective. The result could have been a disaster. Not so. Not so. Swaney’s faith in her concept, and her determination to seek the right participants, have led to a composition that might well live beyond the premiere weekend just past. There could be (and should be) continued life for this “Vonnegut: Requiem.” It contains unity within its expressive diversity. It contains a personality, an individuality of its own.

Due credit to Swaney’s chosen composers, in the order their music is heard: Cary Boyce, Stacy Garrop, Dale Trumbore, Gabriel Lubell, Malcolm Dalglish, Lauren Bernofsky, Don Freund and Moira Smiley. One heard in each contribution the presence of voice. And yet, as if by magic or plan or both, the composed parts, each with a distinctive artistic voice, wove itself comfortably into an integrated artistic whole.

Vonnegut’s philosophical approach favors repose and calm and peace, without high drama and light to “perpetually disturb harmless sleep.” On the path to that conclusion, the music expresses thoughts of the thereafter and sin and wrath and even comedy, but the path becomes clear from the start. This is, indeed, a different requiem Mass.

Amazingly, the instrumentation — for single violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet and percussion — is masterful, remarkably expressive, full-bodied, flexible, often as if an orchestra of chamber proportions to fit the small-scaled (22-voice) Voces Novae. Its realization for the premiere was masterful as well.

The singing, thanks to the choir’s diligence and conductor Swaney’s full-scale commitment and depth of talent, produced the set-to-words music gloriously. Everything proved that, from that decision made all those years ago, Swaney’s strange notion was spot-on right.