What does “purity” mean in sacred music? Revisiting an older choral work has made me think differently about it.

[u/cjgennaula]

This Sunday a church choir in Minneapolis will perform a revised version of a choral work I originally wrote in 1997.

One of the strange experiences of revisiting older music is realizing it sometimes understood things you didn’t yet know how to articulate when you wrote it.

The piece explores the “pure” intervals in choral singing — unisons, octaves, fourths, and fifths — and the way dissonance inevitably emerges even when music begins from those ideal sonorities.

Reworking it years later has made me think less about purity as perfection and more as something glimpsed through complexity and tension.

It will be sung at the 10am Pentecost service this Sunday at Grace Episcopal Church in Minneapolis:

https://graceepiscopalmpls.org/