Drone Mass - Gramophone Editor’s Choice: May 2022

20.04.22, Gramophone.co.uk

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On one level, this contemporary oratorio for voices, string quartet and electronics – commissioned by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) led by cellist Clarice Jensen, who are superb on this recording – is typically Jóhannssonian in its uncanny juxtaposition of the strange with the familiar and its rich interplay of multiple meanings. Even the work’s title plays on the dual notions of a ‘drone’ as something both musical and (often these days) more readily associated with unmanned aerial vehicles – which generate their own buzzing quality. Furthermore, ‘mass’ is treated by the composer as much as a kind of quantity of sound and texture as in its liturgical sense.

Nevertheless, it’s the addition of voices – that most human of elements, who sing ‘wordless’ texts based on the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians – that enables the music to somehow take flight into galaxies far beyond our own here and now, imparting a timeless quality. Brilliantly sung by the Theatre of Voices directed by Paul Hillier, their presence is heard throughout this stirring work.

One can almost smell the incense in the serpentine Byzantine melody heard at the beginning, its austere ceremonial qualities especially appropriate given that the work was first performed at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. This edgy opening gives way to ‘Two is Apocryphal’, a glowing halo of open vowel sounds and falling lines gently underpinned by a softly swaying repeating five-note figure, one of several tender moments in the mass, such as ‘Divine objects, part 2’ and ‘Moral vacuums’.