REQUIEM FOR THE LIVING
Music concert, Pretoria, South Africa
28 August 2016

We attended the second performance of the world premiere of this work yesterday afternoon, in the ZK Matthews Hall at Unisa. The composer was Rexleigh Bunyard, who was a fellow undergraduate music student with me many years ago. We were never personal friends and didn't keep in touch through the years. My sister learned about the concert and the name Rexleigh Bunyard rang a bell.

I didn't quite know what to expect of the work - I hadn't even known that Rexleigh composed - so I was expecting the unexpected. It turned out to be a richly rewarding experience.

Just some background: a Requiem Mass is a Mass for the Dead in the Roman Rite of the Christian church. It is the first word of the entrance antiphon: Rest eternal grant unto them, o Lord (requiem = rest). Rexleigh's requiem is not for the dead, however, but for the living. This is evidenced in numerous ways throughout the work, one of them the simple reversal of the usual order of the Mass, for example the fact that the final item in the usual requiem, the Libera me (Liberate me) becomes the first item in this one.

It is a rich and multi-layered work, one that would require several viewings and listenings to fully appreciate. Here are just some thoughts after a single hearing.

Actually, "hearing" is not the appropriate word. The Requiem is a kind of "Gesamtkunst", a visual drama abounding in sensory clues and impressions. Without the visual element, much is lost.

Rexleigh's Requiem is a mature work, by which I mean it emanated from  a mature mind. The musical sensibility that comes across is confident and well-rounded. I'm not sure how many prior works she has written, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone could start out with a work like this. Rather, this must be the culmination of an ongoing creative output.

I was struck by how deeply intelligent the work was, how much meticulous thought had gone into it; how effective and creative yet not-for-effect the effects were - how natural and organic they were, in fact, in spite of some of them being quite novel at a certain level.

The work is at the same time religious (because it references religious texts), secular (because it draws on the essence of the texts but moves far beyond them), multicultural and uniquely South African. To me, it is a perfect blend of all those elements, perfectly integrated in a wonderfully perceptive and unselfconscious way. If I did have any prior misgivings, these were that this requiem would be a(nother) self-conscious attempt (in the South African context) at inculturation, but it was anything but.

My sister pointed out that the work seemed to work with "sound blocks", and that, once she had figured that out, she could relax and just sit back and enjoy the music. She had intuitively hit the nail on the head.

The work was vibrant and bustling and colorful. There were some poignant and conventionally beautiful moments too. I personally found the Lacrymosa/Kyrie eleison deeply moving.

I found Requiem for the Living totally engaging and very uplifting, and would have bought a CD recording of it, had it been available. A DVD (incorporating visuals) would be better than just the audio, but even that would be a poor substitute for a live performance, guaranteed to sweep you up by its sheer energy, and dwarf you by the magnitude of the scale and concepts.

The above thoughts just scratch the surface (or maybe they capture the essence, who knows).

I would have liked to have program notes before the concert. It was printed on the program that the full program notes could be downloaded from the website at www.reqliving.org (this website is an excellent resource, by the way), but we had to turn our mobiles off at the start of the concert, so how were we to benefit from the program notes when it mattered the most?

Rexleigh came on stage at the end of the concert. I wouldn't have recognized her after all the years without knowing who she was, but I could see the youthful Rexleigh in the mature version: still with the perkiness and vivacity of a little bird, but now very sophisticated.

As an aside, my sister spotted the famed South African opera singer Mimi Coertse, first in the lobby before the concert, then in the audience as we were leaving at the end of the concert. I only saw the back of her, and she struck me as shorter in stature than I had imagined.

I was thinking of the huge amount of effort that must have gone into producing something like this: first the countless hours of planning and creative endeavor, then getting funding for the project; the logistics of getting musicians to rehearse the work and finding rehearsal and performance venues; the years of prior training of the musicians themselves ... the list goes on almost endlessly. The conclusion: you cannot put a price tag on this kind of endeavor and experience. It is ultimately a labor of love, one that needs sponsoring to see the light of day; a startling, miraculous happening not recognized by many, but enriching the lives and minds of those who do in unimagined ways.

Thank you, Rexleigh, and all the sung and unsung heroes who helped make all of this possible.