Monmouth Civic Chorus To Present 'One Body' Concert

COLTS NECK, NJ — The Monmouth Civic Chorus (MCC) is set to present a new concert in March.

On Sunday, March 1, at 4 p.m., the chorus will put on the performance "One Body" at The Parish of St. Mary.

The program will feature Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, alongside two companion pieces written by living composers in response to Buxtehude: Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands and Zachary Wadsworth’s To the Side.

Dr. Ryan James Brandau, in his 14th and final season as Artistic Director of the chorus, will lead the performance.

Alongside Brandau and the performers, a specialist Baroque professional chamber ensemble will join the chorus, with featured vocalists from within the chorus's own ranks.

Though not widely known today, officials said Dietrich Buxtehude was revered by the likes of Bach and Handel, who traveled great distances to hear him perform.

Structured into seven cantatas — each focused on one part of the body of Christ on the cross — and alternating between biblical and non-biblical texts, Membra Jesu Nostri was highly innovative in its day.

"It transforms the era’s traditional Passions for Holy Week, inspiring spiritual devotion through a focus on the corporeal and the personal," officials said.

Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands was commissioned by the vocal ensemble The Crossing in 2016 as a response to Buxtehude’s third cantata Ad manus.

Shaw stated that her piece "begins inside the seventeenth-century sound of Buxtehude" and "expands and colors and breaks this language as the piece’s core considerations — of the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge, and of our role and responsibility in these global and local crises — gradually come into focus."

In 2018, Zachary Wadsworth’s To the Side was commissioned by Dr. Brandau.

Wadsworth said that Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri "forces us to gaze long and hard at the body of the crucified Christ."

He also noted that in To the Side, he combines a quotation from Buxtehude's piece with a portion of a poem by Edward Carpenter.

"Carpenter’s poetry, like portions of the biblical text quoted here, blur lines between religious devotion and secular love," Wadsworth said. "For every painful and pleasurable stab of Carpenter’s poetry, I inject painful and pleasurable dissonances into the string lines, as the chorus searches for a place removed from this great, turbulent ocean.”

In preparing these three works together, Brandau said that “Discovering which musical gestures the imaginations of these living composers zeroed in on has broken open my own listening and exposed new resonances in the ancient score."

"Putting new works in dialogue with the Buxtehude has revivified it, from a museum artifact that we try to present faithfully, to a living, breathing, porous musical expression," he continued.

The performance of "One Body" will be held at The Parish of St. Mary, located at 1 Phalanx Road, Colts Neck.

Tickets for general admission seating are $42 for adults, $37 for seniors, and $15 for students. Group tickets for 10 or more are $31 with the code "GROUP."

Tickets and additional information are available here or by calling 732-933-9333.