Commentarium in "Dominus refugium"
One year later... finally getting around to talking about the first song (LOL).
Praenotanda
Long time no write! Before I remedy that, a few things to mention. I have a sketch of a new song written, and its vocals completed, and I’m having success gathering collaborators to make it happen. I hope to begin posting regular updates on the song’s development starting in January. The song is tentatively titled “Desiderium ad fontes,” utilizing the Latin Vulgate text of Psalms 42-43 (which are basically one connected text).
Once I have a crew finalized, I’ll be fundraising to get the song done by the end of Summer 2025. The costs of the song are: (1) recording and production; (2) honoraria for my collaborators; (3) travel costs, promotion, and so on. If you’re interested in pledging financial support in any way (or know someone who might want to help), please contact me. I’ll be crowdfunding the costs as much as I can, but I’m looking for generous benefactors who are willing to match what funds are donated, up to a certain maximum. Regardless, your prayers and good vibes would be appreciated as well!
Introduction
I’ve not had the time or energy to consistently write about ÆTERNUM as much as I had hoped. If you’ll recall (Hmm?), I wrote up an initial apologia for the project, discussing everything from the inspiration of St. Hildegard of Bingen to the use of Latin, followed by two articles comparing and contrasting ÆTERNUM with past “precursors.” Then I detoured to try my hand at an interview with Dr. Nina Kraus, in two parts, whose work caught my attention because of her interest in the science of “drone.”
So now on the one-year anniversary of the project, it is fitting to finally write a commentary on the first song of the project, “Domine refugium” (using the Latin Vulgate text of Psalm 90). In a future post, I hope to do a podcast episode with two folks who know more about music than I do to discuss some of the musical qualities of the first song. And as I develop the second song, I hope to compare and contrast its development with that of the first to highlight some of the details of how something like this is accomplished.
But now, to the commentary (see track below to follow along)….
The Opening (00:00)
Why start the song with a single violin note hit? Well, I like it… but it’s also a paean to one of my favorite composers of all time, Arvo Pärt. Specifically, it’s meant to reference the opening of his song, “Tabula Rasa: I. Ludus”…
I’m not super into modern composers, but Arvo Pärt’s serious biz for me. His music is a mash-up of Orthodox Christian sacred music inspirations with modern composition techniques, philosophically consistent with what ÆTERNUM is meant to achieve in a different realm of music. He’s earned the overwhelming respect of his peers and the public while keeping his spiritual integrity. You can read more about him at the Wikipedia article. My favorite part of the article is when it compares him with other Estonian composers who have primarily taken their inspiration from the epic poem, Kalevipoeg, to which he responds: “My Kalevipoeg is Jesus Christ.” The article also quotes the musicologist Kerri Kotta as saying that Pärt “has been able to translate something very human into sound that crosses the borders normally separating people.” This, too, is in some way the goal of ÆTERNUM.
Title Verse (00:26)
The Title Verse was a relatively late addition to the song. Typically, when the Psalms are sung in the liturgy, “title verses” are skipped. That makes sense when the title is “To the choir director: don’t screw this up,” or something, but the title of Psalm 89 lends itself very well to being sung…
Oratio Moysi hominis Dei…
A prayer of Moses, the man of God…
The clever part, however, was to augment this line with nostra quoque: “And ours also.” With this simple addition, whatever comes after is an appropriation of the spirit of Moses by the vocalists and musicians. Really, whenever someone prays or sings the Psalms, that person is connecting with a spiritual tradition going all the way back to the ancient Israelites, applying it in some way to what they are experiencing today.
The Build-Up (01:03)
This build-up was always part of the plan from the earliest days of conceiving the song. If you pay attention, the initial build-up is the same riff coming in a measure less each time but it sounds relatively spontaneous. The rest of the build-up gives a chance to introduce some of the musical qualities of the rest of the song: heavy guitars, droning ambient guitar, distorted bass, driving drums, and a violin riffing over the whole thing. The lead guitar and violin weave around one another, sometimes repeating one another’s lines, before coming together to end the introduction.
You’re either in it for the long haul or out at this point.
Movement 1 (02:59)
Domine, refugium factus es nobis
Verse 1 gives the song its title. If you’ve ever looked in a book of antiphons for use in Roman Catholic liturgy, they are often titled according to the first two or three words in Latin. Ergo, the title of this song: “Domine refugium.”
The whole song was developed out of the musical content of this first verse, the earliest sheet music going back to September 2021. It’s in a major key (A-major) because the lyrical content is upbeat and triumphal. It’s an affirmation that, unconditionally, the Lord of Israel has always been with them since the earliest days of their history…
Lord, thou hast been our refuge / from generation to generation. / Before the mountains were made, / or the earth and the world was formed; / from eternity and to eternity / thou art God.
Wanna hear something cool? Here’s the very first attempt at recording vocals we ever accomplished…
That clip was produced on January 2022, but the vocals are from the previous Fall, with at least Olivia and Rachel involved by that point. What you’re hearing was all we had by that point, when it was unclear if there was going to be much more! The instrumental backing is synthesized drum and some guitar loops I recorded. Very primitive, but promising enough.
Note that the “Tu Es Deus” (“thou art God”) is not present yet at the end, probably because it was posing a bit of a challenge already and I didn’t have vocals recorded that were relatively ready for primetime. Also note that the clip doesn’t have that guitar riff variation found in the final mix at 03:22: this developed in the run-up to finally recording.
Bridge (04:03)
Movement 2 is more of a “sad mood,” so it required a different key (E-minor), so some sort of bridge was needed to make a transition from one key to another. This section of the song underwent some of the most radical changes from the earliest days of the project. Here’s a demo clip from February 5, 2022 highlighting the bridge…
The “Tu Es Deus” still isn’t there at the end of Movement 1, but you can hear a synthetic violin line come in at 00:23 when the Bridge begins. In fact, that violin line is the earliest attempt to integrate violin into the song, though not written in sheet music until September 2022. Later on, you can hear various lead guitar riffs that would find their way into the final version of the song, though the guitar bends follow the vocalists more closely in the final version.
But the two biggest developments over time were what’s happening during the third part of the Bridge. Here’s the final track’s version (04:33)…
Now, the “drums” that I had programmed into the continually developing demo track were only a sketch of what I wanted. I knew Andrew J. was such a pro that I could hand this sketch over to him and say, “OK, have fun, let’s see what you come up with,” with full confidence that he’d be able to come up with something solid. But the drums he came up with for this section of the song were all him, and the first time I heard them during practice my response was, “What the heck is that!?” Blown away. He was probably just bored with what I gave him, and I thought they were brilliant so we kept them.
Also notice the vocals in the clip: those are not there in the clip proceeding. Some time between July and October of 2022, as I was putting together all the Movements of the song, I noticed something: the singers are doing nothing for a solid two minutes. It was intolerable. But what could I do? The Psalm text for Movement 1 was used up, as was the text for Movement 2.
After wracking my brain for a bit, it occurred to me. The last few centuries of biblical studies have revealed a tradition of “glosses” in the manuscripts used to make modern day Bibles. These glosses could be commentorial or even additive, so that some of the manuscripts we have today actually integrated meditations on scripture into scripture over time. So I thought to myself, why don’t I just insert a “meditative gloss” into the text?
Because there is a shift from “happy mood” to “sad mood” from Movement 1 to 2, it seemed appropriate to integrate a short text acting as a transition or bridge from one mood to another. The text came to me almost immediately…
I am already being poured out as a libation,
and the time of my departure has come. (2 Tim 4:6)
The “libation” referred to here is the “drink offering” practiced in ancient Israelite religion — and by many ancient religions, apparently, as you can read in the Homeric epics. It is a symbol of sacrifice, and in this passage St. Paul feels himself being poured out as a sacrificial offering as he nears the end of a life lived for the Kingdom of God. Taking inspiration from this, I inserted this gloss of the text into the Bridge…
Sed sicut libatio effundor…
But like a libation I am being poured out…
That “But” is important: it connects back to the triumphant feel of Movement 1, creating with the gloss a transition from “God has always been our refuge in times past!” to Movement 2’s “Life is really freaking hard right now!” Somewhere during these same months I added the Title Verse with its own gloss (“and ours also”), so I suspect that once I felt comfortable inserting glosses like this into the text I just kept going (with due moderation).
Movement 2 (05:25)
I don’t recall how early I had the basic musical content for Movement 2 in my head, but by January 2022 I had the vocals completely developed along with the basic song structure. Here’s a clip including the fourth part of the Bridge leading into Movement 2, with synthesized organs in place of the vocals…
BTW, those organs are how I actually wrote the vocals: I would plonk out the MIDI patterns using a small keyboard, arrange things to perfection, then export the MIDI files into the now-defunct Finale software that generated the sheet music for the vocalists. People, I’m not a musician, I’m a hacker. That’s how I worked as an electrical engineer also: put stuff together until the system does something cool!
Anyways, a few important elements should be noted here. The guitar loop at the end of the Bridge was a very early development, and it found its way into the very beginning of the song once I decided to start with the Title Verse. Further, there is more violin here, though very little developed. Finally, the basic progression of the instruments is basically what is found in the final version of the song: undistorted, then a little crunchy, then very crunchy.
The vocals need more extensive comment. Movement 2 could have swallowed-up the remainder of the Psalm text, and if the vocalists had just plowed through the text together the song would have gone even longer than the final 13m length. As I thought about writing Movement 2, two things occurred to me to solve these issues…
#1: There needed to be a Movement 3
As I read over Psalm 89, I sensed a vague “shift in tone” between vv. 11-14, moving from mentions of “fear” and “wrath” to “mercy,” “joy,” and “delight.” The turning point seemed to be v. 13…
Convertere, Domine; usquequo?
Return, O Lord, how long?
Immediately prior to this, v. 12 ends with a desire to “learn wisdom of heart,” so all of this taken together gave me the following intuitions:
End Movement 2 on a high-note with that talk about “wisdom of heart.”
Begin Movement 3 with the same key as Movement 1.
Re-use the musical content of Movement 1, creating a conceptual bridge.
#2: Movement 2 needed to double-up its text
Now that the text was limited to only vv. 3-12 (!!!), I still needed to compress its usage somehow. Pretty quickly, I hit upon the solution to this:
Divide the text between Sopranos and Altos, but unite them at the end.
Have them alternate what they are doing musically to keep it interesting.
If you look at the Psalm 89 text layout, you can see that Movement 2 has the Sopranos singing all the non-indented text and the Altos all the indented text. Because of how the texts divided, it was natural to sub-divide Movement 2 into four sections (a-d), and this further lent itself to changing up what the vocalists are doing in each of these sections. This was my opportunity to do a bit of organum, wherein one section of singers sings rectotone while the other varies around it. The sequence is what you hear in the final song:
Movement 2a: Altos rectotone while Sopranos vary
Movement 2b: Sopranos rectotone while Altos vary
Movement 2c: Both Sopranos and Altos vary around one another
Movement 2d: Sopranos and Altos unite in singing v. 11-12
The ending of Movement 2d is the coolest part. Not only does it have a great closing guitar riff — developed fairly late in the writing process — but this is also where the vocalists are challenged to effect a key change right in the middle of an intense crescendo (07:25)…
Whew! That one was tough for the singers to recover from before singing again, so in reality we had to record the final Movement after they had a chance to breathe. Speaking of which…
Movement 3 (07:38)
As I mentioned, I had already decided to start Movement 3 in the same key as Movement 1, reusing the latter’s musical content to create a conceptual bridge between the two Movements. These verses constitute a single appeal to God in light of Movements 1 and 2:
Movement 1: God has always been our refuge in the past.
Movement 2: But life is really tough right now.
Movement 3: So be with us now and remain with us into the future.
But a closer consideration of the remaining text revealed a subtle shift in mood over the course of vv. 13-17. Thus, Movement 3 needed to be the most musically complex to reflect the shift in mood that is apparent within it:
vv. 13-15a: Come back, Lord, so that we experience joy again, and now we are experiencing joy again…
vv. 15b-16b: … yet we also think back on how difficult things have been recently, so please remain with us…
vv. 16c-17c: … as we think about our children, and bless our works that we might all thrive together…
v. 17d: … please bless our works.
Thus, what I was looking for in Movement 3 was accompaniment that would go with the following plea: “Return to us Lord, fill us with your mercy and joy, even as we look back on our sorrows. But we also think about what our children might have to go through, so please bless the work of our hands so that they will thrive under your care.”
What really caught my attention in the text of Movement 3 was the repeated opera manuum nostrarum dirige (“direct the work of our hands”). Though it was the last thing I wrote (order of execution), I now aimed to accomplish an extended repetition of dirige at the end of the song (order of intention). I even had a riff to go with it, basically the next in a series of chord-sequences begun in Movement 1: Em-G-A-D-C. It’s a devastating riff, leaving the listener in suspense every time until the final resolution on the last syllable -ge (13:12). So, Movement 3 was gradually divided as such:
Movement 3a (07:38): Em-G-A riff, with a variation at 08:14 that crests at diebus nostris (“all our days”).
Movement 3b (08:37): Em-G-A-D riff, taking on a “modal” quality somewhere between the major-key of 3a and the minor-key of 3c.
Movement 3c (09:27): Em-G-A-D-C riff, completing the transition.
Movement 3d (10:24): Continuing 3c, but fixated on di-ri-ge until the end.
The variation implemented in Movement 3a was intended to break what could otherwise be a bit of a monotonous section, due to the relative simplicity of the vocals. The tonal ambiguity of Movement 3b appropriately reflects the same quality in the text.
Finally, you’ll notice in the final version of the song that the lead guitar joins the rhythm guitar in playing the same riff, intensifying the sound. This was inspired by a happy accident during one of my mix sections when I accidentally screwed up the automation in the software, turning on the acoustic backing track when I never intended to use it at all! Here’s what it sounded like when I first made the mistake…
I loved the way it sounded with the heavier guitar, so I decided to reproduce the effect and intensify the drums to add an extra driving energy to what was coming after. Here’s what it sounds like in the final version…
Movement 3d is my favorite part of the whole song, particularly when it transitions to the half-time, double bass-pedal drum work at 11:27 (which Andrew J. masterfully executes). The vocals achieve exactly the sort of droning quality that I’ve wanted out of this project. Some people have told me that this section gives them the chills, and it should: it perfectly conveys the emotional quality of pleading that God sustain one in the midst of struggle.
Conclusion
That’s about it. I could go on and on about the development of the finer details of the song, but it’s sufficient for now to have commented on its macro-level development history. The vocal sheet music was largely completed by October 2022, though I would continue to add detail to them (e.g. vocal dynamics, notes for the instruments, etc.) until the final edition in May 2023, only about a month away from recording!
The violin parts were developed in parallel going back-and-forth with Gabe, until they too were completed in May 2023. The final few months before recording were spent practicing as a vocal team and an instruments team, and integration was only accomplished in the studio itself. It’s a bit of a miracle that it all came off like it did, and I have Adam Tucker at SignatureTone (and God) to thank for that.
I also owe a lot to Alec (Bass), Andrew M. (Rhythm Guitar), and Andrew J. (Drums) for helping me develop their parts. I gave them some basic guidance as to what I was looking for and they developed their parts from there. I also managed to capture Drums (an electric kit) and Bass during one of our (too few) instrument practices, so I leave you all with the last demo track I ever put together in May 2023 as a model for what we would do in the studio…
I think you’ll agree that the actually released track is far superior to this demo in every way — especially with real violin, finally! — but I’m also proud to say that this demo shows we went into the studio knowing what we were intending to accomplish… and we did it very well.
Blessings upon you and yours on this All Saints’ Day, 2024.
Fr. Brian John Zuelke, O.P.