Time Out for Beauty

When I read the composer Morten Lauridsen explain how a Zubaran painting, filled with religious imagery, inspired his piece Magnum Mysterium, I knew immediately that I wanted to blog about.  But I diddled around and never got to it.

When Gerard Vanderluen posted "O Magnum Mysterium:" The Persistence of Sacred Beauty, I knew I never could do it as well as he.

In an arresting and rare explication and meditation on the origins of great art in our time, composer Morten Lauridsen writes of his own work and the work of a long dead master in It's a Still Life That Runs Deep. The essay reveals a bit, but just a bit, about how inspiration can leap from one medium to another in art and, by such a leap, gain even more power.

Lauridsen's exegesis also reveals how all great art tends to exist outside of time and to defy the "moral, spiritual and aesthetic relativism" that reduces most of our "attempts" at art to rubble. He does so by reminding us that great art, like God, exists outside of time.
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I've seen the painting by Zurbarán and I can attest to the fact of its strange power to arrest the pace and still the attention into contemplation. The underlying symbolism of the work was unknown to me until Lauridsen made it explicit, but I don't find it surprising. After many years of ignorant acceptance of one gruesome and ugly step downward in art after another that I witnessed when I wandered around in New York's overheated and overhyped art scene, I came to the reluctant conclusion that most contemporary art was garbage, that it had no soul, and that deep down... it was shallow.

In It's a Still Life That Runs Deep. Lauridsen contemplates the beauty of Francisco de Zubaran's "Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose.

The painting projects an aura of mystery, powerful in its unadorned simplicity, its mystical quality creating an atmosphere of deep contemplation. Its effect is immediate, transcendent and overpowering. Before it one tends to speak in hushed tones, if at all.
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For "O Magnum Mysterium," I wanted to create, as Zurbarán had in paint, a deeply felt religious statement, at once uncomplicated and unadorned yet powerful and transformative in its effect upon the listener.

Read the whole piece and listen to the beauty Lauridsen created, "a quiet song of profound inner joy."