The Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Chestnut Hill.

by Michael Caruso

When Erik Meyer and Parker Kitterman decided to perform the latter’s musical setting of the “Requiem” on the one-year anniversary of the killing of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, they intended to include in the memorial service the names of those 20 children and six adults killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012. Neither could have imagined that they would also be including the 49 victims murdered in Orlando, Florida, only five days before the scheduled performance Friday, June 17, in the Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Chestnut Hill.

Kitterman, music director at Old Christ Episcopal Church in Society Hill, and Meyer, music director at St. Martin’s Church, conducted and accompanied their combined choirs in Kitterman’s contemporary take on the traditional liturgy of the Requiem Mass. It was heard by an encouragingly large congregation united both in grief over the senseless loss of life and determination to change the culture of violence that threatens to overwhelm our society. The breadth and depth of that mourning can be told by the diversity of the victims: school children in Sandy Hook, Bible scholars in Charleston and nightclub goers both straight and gay in Orlando.

Kitterman, a graduate of both Duke and Yale Universities, set to music nine movements of the ancient liturgy of the Requiem Mass for the Dead. It’s a liturgy that’s been said for martyrs since the time of the catacombs hidden beneath the Eternal City of Rome prior to the early 4th century conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine.

The seminal hallmark of Kitterman’s style is eclecticism, an ability to convincingly combine characteristics both traditional and contemporary. Most of the individual movements of the “Requiem” begin in the style of the Gregorian chant established by Pope Gregory the Great in Rome around 600 A.D. But almost immediately the music branches out from the unison melodies of the plainsong into complex counterpoint of harmonies with chord progressions encompassing both modern classical and jazz vocabularies. Portions of each movement are accompanied by solo organ or solo piano, while others combine both of those keyboard instruments with electric bass guitar and percussion.

What impressed me most of all was the composer’s gift for producing a seamless fabric in which all of these styles not merely co-exist but come together to create a whole greater than the sum of all the individual parts. In many instances, a movement will begin with the choir unaccompanied and then have the organ or piano join in followed by the other instruments. And yet, the effect never seems to have been artificially contrived or imposed on the musical texture but rather to have blossomed organically from within the text that forms the motivation for the music.

Equally memorable is Kitterman’s ability to balance hope against sadness, a feeling that while one aspect of life has ended, another has begun. The music doesn’t look downward; it gazes upward into the promise of Heaven.

Wrapping it all together Friday evening was the exemplary performance the score received from the combined choirs of the two Episcopal churches, St. Martin’s in Chestnut Hill and Old Christ, the first Anglican parish in Philadelphia. The two ensembles formed a tightly knit chorus whose singing was powerful and sensitive, stirring and eloquent.

Kitterman composed his “Requiem” in the wake of the Charleston murders of a year ago, never knowing that events would make it all the more telling one year later. I’m hoping to hear his settings of the Anglican Communion Service, Morning Prayer and Choral Evensong under happier circumstances.