Beatitudes, The

This setting of the Beatitudes employs techniques that might be described as "minimalist--two soloists in alternation singing the words on a pentatonic melody, while the choir sustains seemingly eternal, scarcely changing chord--evoking an atmosphere of timelessness and heavenly angelic worship. Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946) is a Moscow composer who began with post-modernist avant garde and experimental music and later shifted his attention to the chant of the Russian Orthodox Church. His magical setting of the Beatitudes is simplicity itself: two soprano soloists (later joined by a third, singing a descant) alternately sing the words from the Sermon on the Mount to a folk-like pentatonic melody over a timeless ostinato of barely shifting chords hummed by the chorus. Only in the last verse is the music (along with the listeners’ attention) given a new direction—heavenward. The coda, repeated ad libitum, leaves the hearer transfixed and transformed at having experienced something timeless, eternal, and definitely not of this world.