Any conversation about Christians who are significant contributors to contemporary art music must include James MacMillan. Blending Celtic folk music and early Christian church music with the brash sounds of the European avant-garde, James MacMillan forged a path at the turn of the 21st century to establish himself as one of Scotland’s most prominent living composers. Over the past 30 years, he has written multiple concertos, symphonies, and choral works, including a harrowing setting of the Seven Last Words of Christ and heartbreaking setting of the Stabat Mater.

In his memoir, MacMillan writes that Mary’s grief at the foot of the cross is “recognizable to hundreds of thousands of parents around the world, especially today, in a time of war and migrant crisis. Engaging with this degree of tragedy, every day, in the silences of a composer’s daily thoughts and work, has a huge effect on one’s feelings. The heartbreak clings to you.” [1] Furthermore, his own Stabat Mater (2016) reflects the sadness of his mother’s death and that of his severely disabled granddaughter who died a few months after the work was completed.

Whether depicting Mary’s anguished sighs or mimicking the demonic violence of crucifixion, the scope and depth of MacMillan’s music is overwhelming. Particularly striking is his setting of the lines, “oh mother, fount of love, let me feel the power of sadness that I may mourn with you” as the choir is caught up in both exclamatory shouts and freely moving melodies. Ultimately, the sense of anger and loss in this work is not final, as a delicate recurring violin solo reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending seems to point toward hope.

The kind mother was mourning

and aching, when she beheld

the pains of her renowned son.

Julia Perry, an award-winning composer from Ohio, left behind a substantial collection of vocal and instrumental works revealing a brilliant musical sense and deeply spiritual core. Her early works show the strong influence of spirituals and the blues, but her influences reflect her travels abroad as well—travels which included time in Italy studying with Dallapiccola (1951) and Nadia Boulanger in France (1952). Her prolific output, including twelve symphonies and three operas, is especially significant in light of the racism that limited Black Americans’ opportunities in classical music. While Black musicians were thriving in popular styles (jazz, blues, and gospel), opportunities for major performances and commissions were extremely limited in European (white) “art music” circles. Perry and her colleagues— William Grant Still, Florence Price, George Walker, and others—worked to break through this wall.

Perry’s dramatic Stabat Mater (1951) opens with ominous low strings giving way to an ascending solo violin line and the entrance of the female soloist. Surrounded by a ghostly orchestral accompaniment throughout, the singing has the eerie tone of a narrator from an episode of the Twilight Zone TV series from the early 1960’s. Against Mary’s lamentation, Perry’s setting seems to juxtaposition the sound of the crowd’s agitation at Golgotha. While this piece does not overtly engage popular “Black” music, it is difficult not to hear this work as an exploration of the deep pain that Black American mothers faced as thousands of their sons were unjustly imprisoned and executed. The parallels between the biblical story—of a sham trial and the murder of an innocent man for someone else’s crime—resonates deeply with the Black experience of the American justice system in which many innocent Black men found themselves on death row.

Who could not be saddened deeply

at gazing upon the mother of Christ,

mourning with her son?

Pain is universal, and classical concert music is a vast canvas used by people all over the world to communicate and empathize. Born in Sulaymaniya (Kurdish northern region of Iraq), Hawar Tawfiq fled his homeland in 1998, finding asylum in the Netherlands. There his musical talents were discovered by a teacher who worked in the refugee center where he stayed. He is not religious, but was interested in setting the Stabat Mater (2013) because he resonated with its depiction of a mother’s pain. [2] Tawfiq remembers accompanying his mother to funeral wakes as a child, and describes the Kurdish mourning tradition in which “the next of kin of the deceased would sit in the middle of the room and the other guests, such as neighbours and acquaintances, would gather around them. Then, out of the blue, the women present would begin to cry out loud and their spontaneous laments would gradually come to resemble the howling of wolves.” Tawfiq found creative ways to musically depict this lamentation as well as the horrific scourging of Christ using percussion and strings to illustrate the physical violence. Christ’s death is symbolized by a slowly weakened musical pulse which eventually stops, reflecting the halted heartbeat of the crucified one.

Tawfiq’s music typically explores “exotic, nostalgic, non-Western” sounds, and in his Stabat Mater 'An Instrumental Dialogue with the Gregorian Version', he explores connections between Gregorian chant and Kurdish sounds, striving in particular to communicate “purity and the suggestion of infinity, moving and reverent.” [3] While his setting offers moments of intimate dialogue between the harp, solo violin, and percussion, many moments are appropriately far from comforting, instead exploring Mary’s grief, terror, and loneliness. “No matter how much one feels for the grieving mother, in the end no one else can completely share the state of mind of a woman whose thoughts are not only taken up by the inhuman suffering inflicted on her son but also by flashes of memories of happier times.” [4] Click to hear excerpts from the composer’s website (music begins at 3:08).

Make me gently to weep with you,

and to feel the pain of the crucified,

until I will have lived.

For Welsh composer Paul Mealor, music began through a spiritual experience at the age of nine when he fell into a river. He recalls, “I was being dragged under and I fought [to get out] but then something happened… [as I knew I was about to die] I surrendered. And at that moment, the most amazing thing happened: this warmth came all over my body… and I realized at that moment that death was not such a bad thing, and it was a beautiful thing. I was dragged out of the river and resuscitated and from the moment on… I knew there was a spiritual life, and I wanted to know more about it. And that led me to the Anglican church.” [5]

His subsequent encounter with choral music at St. Asaph Cathedral in north Wales completely astounded him, clarifying his calling to composition. Mealor’s music resonates deeply with both choirs and audiences around the world. In works like Ubi Caritas and She Walks in Beauty recorded by Decca Records, Mealor invites listeners on a breathtakingly beautiful journey through melodies reminiscent of early church music reharmonized with sonorities more commonly heard in contemporary popular music and film scores.

Mealor’s Stabat Mater (2009) is perhaps one of his most profoundly personal pieces. He writes, “We are asked, in this text, to join Mary in her sorrow and by joining her, allow her and Christ to grant us a place in the kingdom to come. Again, loss and love, darkness and light are key images—Life in death, the truest oxymoron.” This work was composed “as an antidote to the pain I felt on my grandmother’s death… in this second movement, the voice of ‘the mother’ is heard as the choir sing[s] chants of acceptance underneath and the orchestra almost acts like rising incense. This is music of pain, but of the beauty and peace which tends to follow pain if our hearts are open.” [6]

When my body dies,

grant that the glory of heaven

be given unto my soul. Amen.

Just as Job from the Old Testament, we may never understand the “why” behind a tragic event. But grounded in the “truest oxymoron” of Christ’s cross—life in death—the empathetic poetry of Stabat Mater and its many-faced multicultural musical interpretations reminds us that we are not alone in our grief. It is this astounding promise rooted in the image of the cross—a symbol of death transformed into a symbol of life—that gives transcendent meaning and hope to all who believe.