As well as inspiring generations as a professor at the University of Southern California, Morten Lauridsen is a composer with a global fanbase. His festive O Magnum Mysterium and Lux Aeterna have become staples of choral repertoire, the former featuring on a new recording by the Ebor Singers on Resonus Classics.
Here, Morten tells us about his ways into music, and his compositional process.
I had always thought of music as an avocation. I was a decent pianist, a pretty fair trumpet player and I sang in church choir. I did no music in my first year of college up in Washington, but concentrated on other things. After a summer fighting forest fires, I was alone for ten weeks as a firewatcher on a lookout up by Mount St Helens. I made some major decisions on that lookout; I realised that music needed to be a much larger part of my life.
I’m a tactile person, I like to hear the sound. I write at the piano and I never use a computer. I read poetry all the time. It takes me a long time to find a poem or text that connects with me deeply, and once I find that, it hits me like a thunderbolt and I have to set it.
O Magnum Mysterium was my very first piece for the LA Master Chorale. They had appointed me their composer-in-residence, and asked if I would do my first piece for their Christmas concert. It’s a very difficult piece to do correctly, to get the tuning, tempo and breathing right, but it’s a piece that is sung everywhere in the world these days.
My Lux Aeterna really connected with people. You ought to see the mail I get on that thing! It’s especially true of these troubled times, the pandemic and all this other stuff that’s happening, because it’s a piece that’s hopeful; it’s for the survivors of crisis. I wrote it when my mother was dying and I tried to create something positive and ennobling, something that you can hang on to, light and illumination of all kinds – artistic, intellectual, personal and spiritual.
I need silence. These days we’re so diverted from ourselves, by cellphones and every possible thing, that we lose connection. With pieces like O Magnum Mysterium and the Lux Aeterna, I needed to go very deeply into myself and connect with something very special. So I instil in people, especially young people, to try and find those places where you can do that; places of silence, serenity and pristine beauty. I sought that out and I found it.
