Other notes - Child

When Emmanuel Music commissioned me to write a motet to accompany Cantata BWV 26 Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig, I saw an opportunity to capture a small area of communality between two great and diverse religious practices. The text that Bach chose for this cantata speaks to the sense of human fragility and impermanence that is at the heart of so much literature and religious thought.Bach’s congregation would have understood implicitly that the antidote to this condition is eternal salvation through Christian faith. This is no doubt why Bach’s setting features fast, invigorating music at the outset, despite its seemingly gloomy subject; indeed, after a bracing but stern opening chorale, the tenor aria that follows is positively joyful. In the cantata’s libretto, however, God is mentioned only once, and Jesus and salvation not at all. Removed from its liturgical context, the libretto also evokes the Buddha’s account of the human condition and the impermanence and human suffering that he says is at its core. The text of my motet, O how fragile, how fleeting, pairs translations of two verses from the Buddhist scripture The Dhammapada with the first verse of Michael Franck’s chorale poem Ach wie flüchtig: The continuity between these two sources (composed about two thousand years apart) is remarkably fluid. As regards the music in the motet, I knew that Emmanuel’s newly commissioned motets are sung twice during the service, the second time immediately before the cantata. You will hear some foreshadowing of Bach’s music in my piece, particularly in the opening and in the use of the chorale melody in the second half. A lingering musical tension after the conclusion of the motet leads directly into the start of Bach’s great cantata.

‍