Deus Ex Musica Composer Spotlight: Ivan Moody

This month’s Composer Spotlight guest is Fr. Ivan Moody – a prolific English composer and priest within the Eastern Orthodox tradition now living in Portugal with his wife, singer Susana Diniz Moody, and family. He studied music and theology at the Universities of London, Joensuu and York, and studied composition with Brian Dennis, Sir John Tavener and William Brooks. He is also a conductor and musicologist. As a conductor, he has directed choirs throughout Europe and in North and South America, especially in early and contemporary repertoire. As a musicologist, he has published extensively on the music of the Balkans, of Russia and of the Iberian Peninsula, with special emphasis on contemporary and sacred music. He has contributed to the Grove Dictionary, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology and the Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. His book Modernism and Orthodox Spirituality in Contemporary Music was published in 2014, and reprinted in 2017. He is a Researcher at CESEM – Universidade Nova, Lisbon; Chairman of the International Society for Orthodox Church music; and a Protopresbyter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, being Rector of the Orthodox Parish of St John the Russian in Estoril, Portugal.

Capella Romana, 2018

Ivan, tell us about your journey into music. How did you begin?

I suppose through my father’s record collection. He had a large number of LPs of Bach. Mozart, Beethoven, Dvořák, Sibelius and so on, and quite a lot of traditional jazz. I borrowed many of these discs, and when I was 11 or 12 began my own collection, really quite obsessively, spending all my pocket money on them. The first, as I recall, was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Then I had the obligatory learning of the recorder when I was at secondary school (i.e., from age 11 onwards), and a little later discovered that music was really the biggest thing in my life, largely thanks to two very good music teachers. I began performing with the local music group, which was independent of the school, but run by teachers from it, and we performed a huge range of music, from the mediaeval Play of Daniel to Orff’s Carmina Burana and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.

I was learning piano and double bass, but never became a brilliant performer on either. Then one day I heard a broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by Antony Hopkins, in which he dissected a song by Debussy. I was so fascinated that I sat down and wrote a song myself, a setting of a poem by Blake. I showed it to my music teacher, and the positive response led me to write several more songs, the later ones very much under the influence of Britten. Having initially thought I would go to university to study languages, at the age of 13 I realized that I had to be a composer, and therefore needed to study music to do so properly, and for my undergraduate degree I went to Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London,

Sir John Taverner

As a young composer, you studied with Sir John Tavener. What was that like and what was the most important lesson he imparted?

I began studying with John while I was in the last year of my degree at Royal Holloway, and he impressed me very greatly. We became close friends, and he was the best man at my wedding. Lessons were great fun – long and rambling, often involving diatribes against the decadence of the West, and libations of ouzo. He would come and pick me up from the Underground station in his Rolls-Royce… The most important thing he taught me was to throw notes out. The first piece I sent him was very, very dense, and he made me see immediately that many of the notes I’d put in it were unnecessary, so the next piece I took to him was utterly transparent in textural terms, and he was very surprised. That lesson was something that really stayed with me.

Do you have a favorite sound?

My favourite sound will vary according to circumstance, and might even be silence.

Throughout your music, one can hear the influence of Eastern Orthodox liturgical music. Did you grow up hearing these sounds or is this a later influence?

I became Orthodox when I was, I think, 22 years of age, and I came to Orthodoxy gradually. An English teacher at school had introduced me to Greek culture, and I also came really independently, I think, to love Russian music and literature. The first piece of Orthodox church music I ever heard, in fact, was a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, which was a very controversial piece when it was first published and considered very unsuitable for liturgical use! I became a member of the choir of the Russian Cathedral in London, and deepened my knowledge of the repertoire. When we moved to Portugal (my wife Susana is Portuguese) in 1990, for various reasons we became members of the Greek Orthodox community, and thus I adapted to a very different musical style. And later on I began travelling frequently in the Balkans, and acquired a great familiarity with Orthodox church music in Bulgaria and Serbia.

Your Vespers Sequence is a rich vocal work which – like much early Christian music – seems to move with a different sense of pulse and breath than much of the music that is written today in both contemporary popular and art music. What’s your process when writing this kind of music?

Well, this work is very specific in that it was written for the outstanding ensemble New York Polyphony. So there was the fact that I could write something challenging in a way that would not be feasible for a parish choir, say. (I believe that composers need to be able to work at both ends of the spectrum in these matters.)

The first thing I wrote for them was the vesperal hymn “O Gladsome Light”, based on a Russian chant, in a mixture of Slavonic and English, and that linguistic mix became a feature of the whole Sequence, also including Greek. We then discussed the idea of a longer work, and I suggested using more texts from Byzantine-rite Vespers, as a paraliturgical “sequence”, and that is what happened. The whole set of pieces is essentially chant-based (Byzantine, Serbian and Russian chants), but I do not hesitate to move away from the chant melodies at times, or to harmonize them in ways I would not do were I working liturgically.

This area, which I describe as paraliturgical, a space between the church and the concert hall, I find extremely fruitful. It enables me to work with Orthodox tradition and also to expand beyond it.

What you say about the different sense of pulse and breath is very interesting: it’s something I think is very characteristic of Eastern Orthodox music, and something I think is intrinsic to my music in general, whether choral, vocal, instrumental or orchestral. It has to do with a different kind of thinking about time (often liturgical time, of course), and a willingness to work slowly towards the point of any given piece. But that does not equate to lack of incident… I was much impressed by a review of the piece by David Patrick Stearns, in which he said “The piece was deeply devout but not all that contemplative, if only because Moody is inclined to say a lot in a short space of time.” That kind of observation is not something that would have occurred to me personally, but made as it was by an astute critic present at the concert, it gave me pause for thought and I can see exactly what he meant.

Another gorgeous work – Nocturne of Light – presents listeners with a paradoxical title and music that seems to suspend the passing of time. Where did this title originate? What are the extra-musical influences shaping this work?

This was another very specific commission. The amazing American pianist Paul Barnes is also a chanter at a Greek Orthodox church. He asked me to write a piano quintet that (a) was based on Byzantine chant and (b) was technically challenging. How could I resist?! I had had the idea of writing a nocturne for some time, but this commission made me think about a vigil for the three days between Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection, and therefore including the Harrowing of Hell. So it’s a very programmatic work, a depiction of Life destroying Death, of the Light shining through the darkness. The centre point of the work has the pianist playing on the strings inside the piano, which is symbolic of the destruction of the locks and chains of Hell, which you can see in the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, in which Christ pulls Adam and Eve out from the depths. Naturally, after that point the piece turns towards the Resurrection, and uses the Paschal hymn “Christ is risen from the dead” in its Byzantine version as its musical material.

What is the role of silence in your music?

Silence is incredibly important. Sometimes I write it in – specific bars of silence – but there is also a kind of “relative silence,” in which you are at the threshold of audibility (I’ve written about this, in fact, in the work of both Tavener and Pärt, but it’s something I have used frequently too). Silence I view as something hesychastic – I don’t know if you are familiar with this term, but it has to do with the seeking of a holy quietness (hesychia in Greek) through the contemplation of God in prayer – and the insertion of this kind of approach within a sounding piece of music is not without its challenges, but, again, I think it has to do with the different sense of pulse you mentioned before.

With Arvo Pärt at the RTÉ Living Music Festival (Dublin, 2008)

In 2012, you were commissioned to write a work to be paired with Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater. You chose to set texts from various Byzantine rites associated with Holy Week as well as portions from second-century Homily on Pascha by Bishop Melito of Sardis. The result was a work called Simeron. It’s my understanding that “Simeron” means “today” in Byzantine liturgical Greek. What’s the significance of this word to you and what is your process when setting sacred texts?    

Yes, this was a commission from an extraordinary Belgian ensemble, the Goeyvaerts Trio. They were going to record the Pärt and wanted to commission a new work to go with it. My name was suggested by the soprano Zsuzsi Tóth, a member of the vocal group Vox Luminis, and with whom I had worked previously on another project in Lisbon. I admire Pärt’s Stabat Mater hugely, and wanted to write something that would complement it in some way. Given, then, that his work is to do with the Crucifixion and is in Latin, I thought of a work concerned with the Resurrection and in Greek… The central section of the sermon “Peri Pascha” (“On Pascha”) by Melito of Sardis is a remarkable encapsulation of the Christian faith in a few poetic lines, and spoke to me immediately. To this I added excerpts from liturgical texts from Holy Week. Many of these begin with the word ”simeron” which, as you say, means “today”, intended to place the hearer of the chanted text in immediate relation with the event being celebrated – exactly as in the Roman rite with a text such as “Hodie Christus natus est.”

The way in which I set sacred texts, as I said before, will vary according to context. One thing is writing specifically liturgical music for a particular context and vocal configuration: in those circumstances I take very seriously the limitations and also the perhaps unexplored possibilities of whomever and wherever I am writing for. If I am writing for a professional group using liturgical texts in a non-liturgical way (again we come back to the word “paraliturgical”), I feel much freer, but nevertheless aim to find a balance between total freedom and a way of transmitting extra-ecclesially the sense of the text(s) and chant(s) with which I am working.

You’ve written many sacred works either based on Christian texts or liturgical music. What attracts you to these ancient sources?

Obviously the primary response is that they correspond to and express my beliefs as an Orthodox Christian. But thinking a little more about this question, I would say that there is also a poetic aspect. Most of the secular poetry I’ve set has in some way a ritualistic quality about it, as a matter of fact, even if at some remove from Christianity – Lorca is a good example. When setting actual liturgical texts, it is usually the inspired poetic spark that gives rise to music, in combination with the idea of the spiritual content of that text. Examples of that would be Simeron, about which we’ve talked, or Transfiguration, a recently completed piece to be premiered in Moscow next month (February 2020).

In addition to music, you studied theology at the Universities of London, Joensuu and York. Who are your favorite theologians and why?

I’m not sure I have “favourite” theologians, but I understand what you mean. If I were to make a list, it would be headed by St John the Evangelist, and then, in no particular order, I think of St Basil the Great, St John Chrysostom, St Maximos the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, Vladimir Lossky, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia and Christos Yannaras. But the list could go on indefinitely.

Outside the classical tradition, are there any musicians or genres toward which you particularly gravitated?  

I am hugely involved, of course, in liturgical chant, so Byzantine, Serbian and various kinds of Russian chant have been of huge significance to me, spiritually, aesthetically and musically. Apart from that, Sardinian folk and sacred music, Greek and Serbian folk music, Flamenco, and a good deal of Jazz.

As an active composer over the past 25 years, what trends or changes do you see in contemporary concert music? Are there any changes that you would like to see?  

I’d like to see, in terms of programming, a compromise between the “Nobody wants to listen to this stuff so let’s stick with Mozart” attitude and the “Mozart is no longer relevant; let’s programme new work exclusively” attitude. I really do think that it is possible and desirable in this day and age to be open to many things.

As to what people actually compose, I can’t possibly say what should or could happen. I can only react to what is happening now. As a matter of fact,

I read an article recently in a Portuguese newspaper, which contains opinions from an unabashedly tonal composer of my generation and those of an older composer, a disciple of Boulez et al., but who has taught and influenced many younger composers of diverse stylistic paths, about this very thing, and what I thought really telling was the fact that the latter was by far the more open-minded.

Inspirational sacred texts and tunes aside, how has your Christian faith shaped your musical life?

Firstly in a very literal way, in that groups interested in sacred music tend to ask me for pieces! And then there is the question of thinking about music’s purpose, and whether and how it can be a vehicle for the sacred.

Working as composer and clergyman.

Are there aspects of your faith that have been influenced by your work in music?

As a composer, when working with texts such as those we’ve been discussing here, I have the opportunity to go very deeply into them and come to a far greater understanding of their theological depth. And the other thing is simply being spiritually overwhelmed by a performance. I remember, for example, being completely drained when conducting Schnittke’s Penitential Verses with Cappella Romana some years ago. Of course the music is very technically challenging, but it was the spiritual trajectory of the piece that really affected me. There is also that immediate connection that one finds with certain performers so that the music just flows in the most extraordinary way and transmits the message exactly. Certainly I have found that to be the case with New York Polyphony, Paul Barnes and the Goeyvaerts Trio, but also with the German ensemble Singer Pur, for example, with whom I have collaborated regularly.

Is there any advice that you would offer young composers today?

Listen to as much as you can, never stop learning and do not be afraid!

To hear more of Ivan’s music, please visit: http://www.ivanmoody.co.uk/

Interview with Ivan Moody conducted by Josh Rodriguez via email between Dec. 1st, 2019 & Jan. 20th, 2020

If you are interested in contributing an article or would like to recommend a topic for exploration, please send an email to: blog@deus-ex-musica.com Photos used with composer’s permission.