A former student asked me to fill her in about some music we sang a couple of years ago so she could talk about the music as part of a college project. I wrote her the following message and decided to save it on the blog as well.

I imagine that you are talking about the Kyrie eleison that was from the Francesco Brusa Mass. (Actually there were two). Let's break it down this way. The Roman Catholic worship service is called the "mass". This title comes from the last sentence of worship which is "ita missa est" ("the service is ended") in Latin. Parts of the text of the mass change for every day of the year. However certain words are spoken in every recitation of the mass. This repeated portion is called the "ordinary" (everyday). Composers often set the text of the ordinary to music because it might be sung at any time! Last year and the spring before we sang the "Missa pro defuntis" of Francesco Brusa. Missa pro defunctis means "mass for the dead." A mass for the dead is often called a "requiem" mass. Such a mass would be spoken or sung as a funeral remembrace of someone or sometimes as a memorial service for all members of a congregation that have died in the past year. The text of the requiem mass is somewhat different from a regular mass, as you might expect. The particular text of the mass we sang was the same text used by W.A. Mozart in 1791 when he wrote his final composition, the Mozart Requiem. The work we sang was written by Francesco Brusa (1700-1768) in 1767, to be performed by the girls of the Venetian Ospedali. The ospedali was started by Venetians around 1100 a.d. to provide for the welfare of orphaned or unwanted girls. Venice was a very forward thinking city in many ways and over the years the terms Venetian Ospedali came to mean any of four different institutions that provided education and welfare for these young abandoned girls. Those who were able were educated and taught music skills. They became world famous performers. By the 1700's Venice was the entertainment capital of the world and people vacationed there. One of the must see tickets in Venice in the 1700's would have been musical performances by the Venetian Ospedali girls. The most famous composers in the world wrote music for them and came to work as their conductors. A famous contemporary of Bach's, Antonio Vivaldi, was perhaps their most recognized leader. Brusa is little known and most of his compositions may not have survived to the modern day. We do know that he was born in or near Venice and that he worked as an organist for the Venetian "ospedali" (hospital) as early as 1720. He was well known as an opera composer during his lifetime. In 1767, when he was 67 years old, he was asked to fill in for another famous conductor/composer (Galuppi) while he went on a trip to visit Russia and compose music for the Russian noble court. I imagine he saw this as a short term job to help him with his "retirement" years. The story is that Brusa was well liked by the performers who begged him to write a composition for them. The performers included instrumentalists and singers. Brusa then composed a requiem mass for women's voices and strings for the girls to play and sing. That musical work was fairly short, about 20 minutes long in total. Following its performances in 1767 it was put in the library at the ospedali. Shortly afterward, in 1768, Francesco Brusa died. Fortunately, although the work was never published nor received wide performance during it's own day, the libraries of the ospedali have been kept intact to this day. The Venetian ospedali went bankrupt in the 1770's and the music education and performances for the girls ended. In the last 25 years there has been increased interest in bringing the music of this institution back into modern performance editions. Around 1994, Dr. Sharon Paul, who teaches on the west coast, brought a copy of the Brusa mass to San Francisco. She was the conductor of the San Francisco Girls Chorus and had a music editor, Peter Simcich (pronounced Sim Kich) prepare a modern edition for the girls to perform. They recorded this music around 1995. I heard it on CD some years later and began to search for the music. It still had not been published and the San Francisco Girls Chorus would not loan it to me. I looked up Peter Simcich however and told him how much I wanted to perform the music and over a period of time he was able to get permission from the San Francisco Girls Chorus to publish an edition. He worked with me on the edition and I corrected many errors in the text, both in spelling and in positioning the syllables underneath the notes. Finally the edition was published in May, 2003, and we performed the world premiere of the modern published edition of Brusa's Requiem. So there was a lot of history behind our performance. The text you remember "Kyrie eleison," is the opening sentence of the mass. Oddly it is not latin, but even older, one of the first remnants of Christian worship. These words are Greek, the language of the early church, and they mean "Lord, have mercy (on us)." The next line is "Christe eleison" and then "Kyrie eleison" is repeated again. The opening text of the mass expresses the idea that as believers come into the presence of God, or begin to think about God in worship, confronting the holiness of the deity causes them to recognize their own sinfulness and lack of standing before God. Their first words then are, "Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy."