Fiat Voluntas Tua - pipe organ impression from 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'

Fiat Voluntas Tua
pipe organ impression from 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'
• Recorded at St Wilfrid’s Anglican Church, Pretoria, on 16.10.2024
• Camera set-up: Revd. Grant Thistlewhite
• Pipe organ/Sanctus bell: Izak R. Crafford
NB: Listening with good headphones is recommended for the proper hearing of the pedal part and the tone colours of the various registers/combinations of the same used.
Introduction to the improvisation
1. Literary background
Since its publication, Walter M. Miller Jr’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” has received sufficient praise that, on grounds of economy and the superfluity of doing so, I need not write a laudation of this work. It stands out for me in the genre of Science Fiction due to its literary quality, narratological character, and, chiefly, its frank and unashamed thematization of the Christian religion, the significant work of the church in the preservation of knowledge and learning, and its philosophical depth. A further aspect wanting pointing out is the humanity of its characters which the very strangeness of Science Fiction worlds often manages to distort or drown out.
During my first reading of the novel, I was particularly struck by the two characters having to wrestle with their vocations: Brother Francis in the first part, with whose Lenten vocational fast in the desert the work opens and, in the third part, Brother Joshua, obliged to discern whether or not he might have a vocation to the priesthood within the context of his abbot’s desire that he lead the group of monks who are to establish an extraterrestrial daughter house of the abbey given the imminent threat of repeated nuclear disaster. Both of these scenes of wrestling, Brother Francis in the desert and Brother Joshua in the courtyard, lie at the heart of what I sought to depict in the current improvisation, though my intent was not to paint scenery, but rather to depict the psychological landscape wherein the two monks find themselves during these periods: Brother Francis’s mind grown feverish from little sustenance and the harsh weather and Brother Joshua’s sense of uncertainty and spiritual battle. Only in one instance did I turn to the depiction of their surroundings.
There is a fascinating near parallel in the description of what these two characters perceive during the course of their experiences relevant to my improvisation. In the second chapter we read of Brother Francis’s investigation of the documents he has discovered in the fall-out survival shelter he stumbled upon when wanting to extricate from a pile of stones that which the pilgrim had found to complete his shelter against the beasts of the desert. The monk comes to the conclusion that he has found relics of the Blessed Leibowitz, [founder of his order], by which he believes to have received a vocation to the monastic life. This is followed by a brief description of the distant abbey bell tolling for the Angelus, a short liturgy in which the incarnation of Christ is brought to mind. “And the word was made flesh: and dwelt among us.” This is a versicle, with its response, from the Angelus, the possible significance of which should become apparent presently. While Brother Joshua wrestles with the question of his vocation in the 26th chapter, he sees through the door of the abbey church, which has been left ajar, the red sanctuary lamp indicating the presence in the tabernacle of the consecrated Host, id est: the Word made flesh come to dwell among us. Perhaps I imagined this near parallel, perhaps not. Whatever the truth of the matter, it came to constitute the core of the improvisation, the only section of traditional harmony amidst what otherwise is a chiefly dissonant piece, further emphasized, [based on the description in the second chapter], by my tolling of the Sanctus bell, through which a further connection is established to the Mass.
2. A musical note
There is to the dissonant idiom of much classical music of the 20th century and our time a certain meanness and threatening quality that cause me to avoid it whenever I can or, at least, to use it sparingly. One can, however, argue that this harsh idiom is the best possible musical expression of the Modern and Postmodern zeitgeist, a making audible of the disorientation, darkness, and alienation of our time, often seeming utterly inhospitable and wilfully ugly. I employed this idiom here both to depict the inhospitably harsh desert landscape wherein Brother Francis finds himself and Brother Joshua’s spiritual disorientation, but also to grapple with the foreignness of the current culture to them that seek to live lives in the service of God, and to show what I have concluded to be the moving away of society from the noble and sublime, whereby these have become alien to it and irreconcilable with it, thereby expanding the subject of the improvisation beyond “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, to become a depiction of this decadent epoch.
#AcanticleforLeibowitz #Pipeorgan #Painting #sublime