I’ve had this experience many times: I get my new music for an upcoming concert with my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, take a look, and see composers’ names that are completely unfamiliar to me. Then I start doing research for these posts and find out that these unknown people are quite active in the world of choral music. Such was the case as I leafed through our sheet music for the March 2022 concert centered around works by American women and saw the name “Jocelyn Hagen” on the piece “I Will Sing and Pray.”
So I looked Hagen up and quickly discovered that I most certainly should have heard about her. Not only is she a composer, she’s also music publisher, a founder of the a cappella band “Nation,” a clinician and teacher who has pioneered along with co-founder Tim Takach ways to coach singers with digital products, and a pioneer in the use of software that can marry video and music without the use of an annoying “click track.” But I’ll let her describe that last creative endeavor herself. Follow the link below to her TEDx talk; it’s truly fascinating to hear her explain how it all works.
Back to the piece we’re singing. As always I’m skipping over any musical analysis because I’m totally unqualified to do that. Instead, let’s take a look at the texts Hagen used. I was quite intrigued by them, as she’s using segments from three different passages in the Christian New Testament, all written by the Apostle Paul. After trying to chase down exactly which translations were being used I gave up; it’s fair to say that the words don’t fit neatly into any version. I wondered how Hagen had landed on them. So I contacted her through her site, and here’s what she said:
I happened to write this work quite a while ago, and I don’t think I have a great story for you on why I chose the text. I believe it was given to me! That being said, I take a lot of care in picking what texts to set to music. In fact, sometimes it takes longer to find the right poem than it does to compose the piece! The poem will often “sing” to me, and that’s how I know I want to set it. And I especially love setting poems by women.
So, with all due caveats, I imagine someone saying to Hagen, “Hey, there are some cool verses about praying and singing in the New Testament that might make a good choral piece.” And she ran with it, using the repetition of “I will pray/sing with the spirit/understanding” as the spine of her piece. The general idea of this text, without going into a lot of theological debates that it has engendered over the years, has to do with the need for both emotion and reason in our lives. In the context of the passage as a whole the Apostle Paul is saying, “Don’t rely on ecstatic utterances that you don’t understand as a form of public worship, since others won’t know what you’re saying.” Or, as a modern translation says, “I should be spiritually free and expressive as I pray, but I should also be thoughtful and mindful as I pray. I should sing with my spirit, and sing with my mind.” Paul goes on to say later in that chapter, “But when I’m in a church assembled for worship, I’d rather say five words that everyone can understand and learn from than say ten thousand that sound to others like gibberish.” 1
If you follow the text of Hagen’s piece carefully you’ll see that she’s keeping a distinction going between a person’s individual “spirit” (which is not capitalized) and the biblical idea of the Holy Spirit (which is capitalized). I don’t think she’s hewing to a strict interpretation here with her theological views; this piece was published in 2016, five years after her monumental work amass which started out as a setting of the traditional Roman Catholic mass but then morphed into a work of “interreligious harmony.” She has some interesting things to say about her struggles with faith in her introduction to that piece (from which the previous phrase was taken); you can read that material here. If I were to plot out the logistics of her ideas I’d say that she sees human and divine emotion or spirit as being very much intertwined. The climax of the piece comes on the words “that you may be filled with the fullness of God.” It then returns to a repetition of the spine text, fading away into a final pianissimo “understanding.”
Before getting to the videos I’d like to point out a delightful detail about the publisher of this work, “Jubal House Publications.” Jubal shows up in the Jewish Bible book of Genesis as being the ancestor of those who play “stringed and wind instruments.” That sort of covers the field, doesn’t it? You might wonder why Hagen didn’t publish this work through the music publisher she co-founded, Graphite Publishing; that outlet, however, sells only digital music PDFs and not printed sheet music. I wonder if more and more publishers are going to go digital only, a process that has long been in the works. I’ve started seeing members of my own choir using iPads or other e-readers instead of their printed sheet music. They can scan the sheet music into their devices and use a stylus to mark up the score electronically. It’s a much easier process than making and then erasing physical marks on paper or making the one “personal rehearsal copy” that is allowable under copyright law and then marking that. It’s going to be an interesting evolution to watch.
First, a fine performance video of this piece:
And here’s the promised TEDx talk in which Jocelyn Hagen talks about and demonstrates how she integrated video and music in a recent composition:
And, just for fun, here’s a similar composition by John Rutter in that he uses the same “spine” text–but not any of the supplemental ones that Hagen does. It’s very “Rutterly,” and fun to compare the two compositions:
