...against the dying of the light
OnHiFi.com
Wes Phillips

It's going to happen to you, which I can certainly deal with. But it's also going to happen to me -- and I'm much less calm about that. It is, in fact, the one thing we can all be sure of (popular aphorisms to the contrary, the "and taxes" part doesn't seem to apply to everyone, as clearly shown by Enron).

I'm speaking, of course, of death.

It's the big subject -- one that our most profound artists have grappled with since mankind first developed abstract thought. Man is the only animal aware of his own mortality and one school of thought holds that all art is simply tales around the campfire, attempts to distract ourselves from the knowledge that every second we are alive brings us a second closer to our death.

Perhaps that's true, but it seems to me that humankind's most profound works of art concerning death have been in the realm of music. From requiem masses to depictions of death and transfiguration, music history is packed with meditations on death and dying. Strangely enough, they seem to make us feel better.

Leaving to one side the piano sonatas and string quartets of Beethoven (for it could be argued that in these works of pure music Beethoven grappled with death and won, achieving immortality), the greatest of musical explorations on the subject have combined words and music. While music is vast enough to contain death itself, many people find it difficult to think of such an immense concept without the precision of words -- combining the two allows us to immerse ourselves in music's ocean while also offering us concrete meanings that prevent us from being completely swept away.

...against the dying of the light collects 12 musical meditations on death and arranges them in a grand narrative arc that takes us from an expression of life's futility (Sibelius's "Hymnus") to an instant of musical beauty so profound that it actually emulates the transcendence it describes (Barber's "Heaven-Haven (A Nun Takes the Veil)." That's an exhausting journey, but like all successful art, it is also an astonishingly restorative one.

I've written about Cantus before -- I reviewed the group's preceding album, Let Your Voice Be Heard [CTS-1201], here last April and I described its recording. I attended the recording sessions for ...against the dying of the light, which were intense (you can read about that in the December 2002 Stereophile, which should be available by the end of the month).

But just as you should never judge a book by its movie, being present at a recording session (or even following the mastering process through its various stages) is nothing like the experience of the completed project. It's almost an article of faith among audiophiles that the real thing, as far as music is concerned, is the live performance.

The argument has a lot going for it. I've certainly never heard a hi-fi that sounds as good -- as natural, as dynamic, as tonally pure -- as an accomplished musician playing a great instrument in a room with superb acoustics. But performances aren't perfect -- Glenn Gould had a veritable laundry list of reasons he considered them to be unnatural, chief among them that "one should not voyeuristically watch one's fellow human beings in testing situations that do not pragmatically need to be tested."

A compact disc is a physical object as well as a musical record and it can express concepts or display values that aren't expressed by the music it contains. What initially struck me about ...against the dying of the light was its packaging, which can only be described as lavish. The CD's jewel-box and 48-page booklet are contained in a die-cut slipcase featuring a black-and-white photograph of the singers standing off in the distance against the flat horizon. The booklet features the texts to the songs starkly laid out in the midst of page after page of uncluttered white space. The whole feel is of seriousness and reverence. It reminds me of the few deluxe Soria LP editions I have from the early days of the LP -- people like 'em and that's why so many of them still exist almost 50 years after their release. I'm sure most folks will feel the same about this new Cantus CD.

The biggest difference between the recording sessions and the disc lies in hearing the program in its entirety, not in fits and starts. And that is where my sense of wonder kicked in. I'd heard all the component parts of the disc, but I was not prepared for its impact as a complete (and discrete) experience.

It's overwhelming.

The program material includes Sibelius's Scandinavian fatalism ("Fate does not grant to [Man] her solace sweet/Nor life of ease"), Pablo Casals' despair (" . . . see if there is any sorrow like unto mine"), and even Debussy's dream of the afterlife ("Rise up, voice of my soul/ . . . /Throw yourself forth like the flame/Spread yourself like the noise/Float on the wing of clouds"). Along the way, we lament with David for dead Absalom, find solace in the words of the de profundis, and invoke Dylan Thomas's plea to "not go gentle into that good night." But it is the journey's destination that delivers the disc's payoff -- after an almost interminable silence (only 30 seconds, although it seems longer in situ), the group sings Barber's setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Heaven-Haven (A Nun Takes the Veil)." Floating on billowing major chords, the group sings of a paradise "where springs not fail/To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail/And a few lilies blow."

It's the aural equivalent of heaven.

So's the disc. John Atkinson recorded the group in a small but reverberant stone chapel at 24-bit resolution and an 88.2kHz sample rate. The group is reproduced in a tight, shallow arc running from one speaker to the other. Their sound is direct and immediate, and the surprisingly rapid reverberance of the recording venue gives the sound a brilliance I find seductive. It's not a forgiving sound, and some listeners will wish for the more distant, less energetic sound of a mid-hall perspective. In fact, Atkinson intended to use post-production artistry to smooth over what he describes as "the stark vividness" of the sound, but even minimal amounts of post-production "fixes" destroyed the organic honesty of the sound. ...against the dying of the light is a faithful record of what Cantus sounded like in that specific church (the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at Shattuck-St. Mary's School in Faribault, Minnesota), which is, after all, one of the goals of high-resolution recording.

For a host of reasons, but especially because ...against the dying of the light succeeds on so many levels -- artistic, sonic, and simply as an object of great beauty -- I encourage you to hear, to experience, this very special recording.