BAHÁ’Í COMPOSER’S WORLD PREMIERE

N ITS relatively short history, the Bahá'í Faith has already inspired a broad canon of devotional music. While their counterparts in the east chanted prayers and holy writings in the prevailing Arabic or Persian styles, early 20th century western Bahá'ís composed hymns in a traditional Protestant idiom to be sung at community gatherings and in the Bahá'í House of Worship near Chicago.

More recently, musicians who have been inspired to compose settings of the Bahá'í scriptures have included the great Indian musician Ravi Shankar and the distinguished Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen.

On 19 May 2001 the Northamptonshire village of Brixworth was the setting for the world premiere of a new work which could well become a benchmark for composers setting the Bahá'í writings to music.

ANCIENT CHURCH, MODERN MUSIC

Brixworth's 7th century Saxon church - believed to be the largest of its kind in northern Europe - was the venue for Richard Leigh's Myriads - a setting for solo singer, choir, piano, percussion and harp of a small number of sacred writings drawn from The Hidden Words of Bahá'u'lláh. This is the best-loved of all the Bahá'í scriptures - a collection of 153 short moral aphorisms which Bahá'u'lláh described as a distillation of the spiritual guidance of all the religions of the past.

Leigh is a young composer from Kettering who has had a remarkable impact on the musical life of Northamptonshire. His work with young singers and instrumentalists in the county have been widely acclaimed.

He is also a successful teacher and performer in a wide range of musical styles. Myriads is written in a unique style which resolves a challenging, contemporary palette of sounds with melodic and harmonic structures that move and thrill the listener.

In this performance, Leigh's forces were cleverly combined. The piano was 'prepared' in a manner pioneered by the composer John Cage with nuts and bolts and other items placed on the strings, resulting in a metallic, percussive effect when the note is struck.

“SPINE-TINGLING”

This, combined with Tibetan prayer bowls, solo vibraphone notes bowed with a double bass bow, and harp ostinato patterns, created an ethereal backdrop over which the singers passed Bahá'u'lláh's words between themselves, setting up spine-tingling effects where notes collided and then resolved, and tones were exchanged and transferred from side to side - creating something akin to a live stereophonic experience.

At other times, the choir reached a climax only to stop abruptly leaving the percussion ringing alone its faint, distant response. The work concluded with a breathtaking postscript in which the name of Bahá'u'lláh (Arabic for 'the Glory of God') was repeated and intoned.

This is a work which deserves to be savoured again and again, and promises many good things to come from an original British composer.

RW

Kettering-based composer, Richard Leigh