There are two songs that I am pretty addicted to for the last few months. They are choral songs, like quite church-ey, but both by not only living composers, but young ones. I believe both are younger than me.
Jacob Collier I believe is merely 29 years young, while Blake Morgan at least looks younger than me, or at least on par.
Their age is important here. People make music according to their time, and so these pieces of music could be considered a kind of cutting edge of modern choral music, and both of them have a heavy dose of Jazz influence, create what I consider the perfect melting pot of the two giants of music (the other half of course being classical).
Blake Morgan's piece is an arrangement of a classic, Finlandia, with music by Sibelius set to the poem This is my Song by Lloyd Stone - which I'm sure at the very least some Finnish folk here should recognise, as it's often considered the 'unofficial anthem' of the country. It's a beautiful song in itself, but Blake Morgan's rendition is just stunningly gorgeous.
He wrote it for his group, Voces8, to perform who themselves are just world class singers I have yet to find a superior to.
Jacob Collier's is the last track on his latest album, a song which he stated himself as pretty much his crowning achievement and absolute favourite composition, World O World.
Both of them show the kind of musical depth and brilliance I could only dream of replicating, but they are certainly very distinct in style. Jacob is all about intense, thick harmonies that, no matter how dissonant and atonal in isolation, somehow work wonderfully when put in context.
Blake Morgan, well, I don't know his work outside of his singing in Voces8, but he's clearly a monstrous talent.
I simply cannot decide which one I prefer!
Take 10 minutes and have a listen to each. Take note that Voces8 are the vocal group performing in both of these recordings!
World O World
This is my Song (Finlandia)
The cool thing about these being modern pieces is that there's often easy access to their scores. As you can see, some random hero on youtube transcribed the whole piece of World O World, and Blake offers his score free himself anyway, so we can dive in and appreciate them even more.
Finlandia
The lyrics here are so wonderful to me. It feels like a call to respect the beauty of the world and its people, but I believe it was really a call to peace between nations in the midst of one or both world wars. I particularly like some of the opening lines:
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
Such a wonderful recognition that, despite how we might feel about our home land and how its features forever imprint in our minds as home, everybody has their own callback to their beautiful landscape in their own ways, whether it's the gentle rolling hills of England, the mighty Himalayan mountains, or the vast plains of Mongolia.
(Of course this was before the smog coating the majority of the global population destroyed most of the clover, pine and blue skies, but let's just pretend that never happened).
My absolute favourite moment is this very spicy harmonic movement:
Let me compress that (brb 5 minutes):
Something like that.
You don't need a music degree to know that looks chaotic. It's spicy as hell but it works so well.
World O World
This one is an original composition, and starts off quite pastiche, that is to say, stylistic adhering to classical standards. Very pure and 'correct' in the 18th century kind of way. It doesn't take long to break away from that, however, and at points you get some serious spice. What makes it so beautiful for me, though, is how it always reverts back to that much more familiar classical sound, a safety net for our ears.
It really is quite striking when your music starts off looking like this:
And ends up looking like this:
Bach would be puffing his chest out with pride in the first one. I think he'd be puffing his chest out in heart attack over the second one! Then again, the voice leading is stunning so maybe not.
Lyrically, quite dull as is usual with Jacob, so I guess I have little to nothing to say about it XD
Conclusion
Yeah I still can't decide which I prefer. If I had a gun to my head I'd have to go with Finlandia simply because the lyrical content touches my heart a lot deeper than Jacob's boring 'Nothing stays and nothing lasts, Always moving on, Y love again when you are around. Panders too much to the pop realm for my tastes.
I think this kind of music is really a must-listen for anyone, even if you spend your entire life listening to club anthems. Sometimes it's just nice to breathe in everything that music has to offer. These are truly huge breaths of fresh air into the classical and jazz scene and shows the power of combining the two.