Tido Visser’s 150 Psalms a songbook for humanity
For artistic director Tido Visser, the psalms’ exploration of injustices and inequalities are as relevant today as they were 3000 years ago.
Tido Visser is a typical Dutchman: he doesn’t mince his words. The artistic director of the Nederlands Kamerkoor talks about the time his organisation lost the plot and became mediocre. He talks about the era when art lost the plot and became “art for art’s sake”, even as European society was heading for the horrors of WW1. He talks about the political purpose of art in the past and in our times.
Visser is bringing his brainchild, a monument to a religious musical genre and a deep political statement, to the Adelaide Festival at the end of February. The title, 150 Psalms, indicates its magnitude. One hundred and fifty psalms have been chosen, each set to music by a different composer across the three religions of the book: the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. Several commissions bring the works into the contemporary world, including four for Adelaide: by Elena Kats-Chernin, Clare Maclean, Cathy Milliken and Kate Moore.
The job of performance — from its 2017 premiere in Utrecht to New York to Brussels — has been shared among four a capella choirs: the Nederlands Kamerkoor, Det Norske Solistkor, the Tallis Scholars and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street. In Adelaide, the Song Company will replace the Americans.
When Visser was thinking the project through, he realised how applicable even the oldest psalms are to our day. “I realised that those psalms are about unrighteous leaders, they are about plagues, they are about abuse of power, about refugees. In the very naked way in which they were written, they seemed incredibly timely for the (era) we are living in.” On the Nederlands Kamerkoor website, the concerts are accompanied by pictures of war and of refugees. In Adelaide the performances will be complemented by an exhibition, presented in partnership with The Australian, of contemporary photographs from this newspaper’s archives, each of which is paired with a psalm whose lyric it represents.
Also typically Dutch is Visser’s blurring of the moral bases of the project and subjecting them to political realities. He himself is a non-believer, though he does recall with pleasure singing psalms in church with his grandmother when he was little.
“I’m not a practising Christian but I do sometimes feel like a preacher,” he says with a grin as an aside.
“It’s the only book, it doesn’t matter which god you believe in or if you believe in a god at all, it’s the only book in the Bible where it’s not God speaking to mankind,” he says. “It’s the book where mankind speaks up to God and says, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing to us? We’re looking for an explanation. I’m hurt.’ It’s mankind seeking comfort and it’s also mankind in joy and in awe of the amazingness of the world.”
The psalms’ exploration of injustices and inequalities that cleave society horizontally, vertically and diagonally is as germane today as it was when Jews were composing the Old Testament 3000 years ago. Visser reminds us that the Jewish testament became part of the Christian Bible and is considered holy by Islam. “The People of the Book. Today we are still arguing: lower class versus upper class, men versus women, indigenous versus colonists, and so on.
“I see those psalms as one little gloss on the entire map of mankind,” Visser says. “And when we are in fierce discussion, we can return to them and say, ‘Oh yes, I think we all relate to that.’ ”
Choosing the 150 psalms and the composers who set them to music was no easy task. It was to be only one psalm per composer. What to do when staring at two magnificent scores, by Allegri and by Bach, say, for the same towering poem? Visser asked a previous director of the Kamerkoor, Leo Samama, who is also a composer and a musicologist, to make the musical choices.
“Fortunately for the programmer,” Samama has written, “the search area is very sizeable: more than a thousand years of written down vocal music, and not only from Europe, even though the emphasis does lie there. From age-old single- and multiple-part hymns from the Russian Orthodox tradition, by way of Armenian and Arabic psalms, to the sometimes higgledy-piggledy North American settings from the late 18th century.
“From the luxurious and complex polyphonic psalms of the Italian, Franco-Flemish, Spanish and Portuguese Renaissance to modest, initially mainly homophonic Lutheran and Calvinist settings. And from the unison settings as dictated by the Church of Rome to a number of new settings that have over recent months been written specially for this unique project. The resulting panorama is multi-coloured though certainly not complete or all-encompassing.” The psalms also had to be organised somehow. Dutch theologian Gerard Swuste was called in to divide the psalms into 12 chapters, or central themes, each a concert in the series. The psalms are not presented in numerical order.
“Not everyone loves the psalms,” Swuste has written about the project. That Dutch bluntness again. “Christians in particular, who have been taught to love their enemies, are often disturbed by the feelings of hate found in the psalms. And yet these are feelings everyone has now and then, as is the desire for revenge. Not that we actually carry it out but the emotion is there all the same. As Psalm 139 says: God has long been aware of your innermost feelings, so express them — pour your heart out!”
Swuste continues: “Psalms do not appear only in the Bible. In the Middle East, during the pre-Christian era, it was a common literary genre. It is poetry with a distinctive rhythm and with many examples of parallelism and chiasmus. Thoughts are expressed twice in slightly different words, or sometimes with opposite meanings. It’s as if the poet really wants us to let it sink in. Reading the psalms is almost always a matter of marking time — you are virtually forced not to hurry.”
Visser’s concerns, though he is a musician and a former singer himself, keep veering back to the political in the here and now. He acknowledges “the cynicism” of the project having such an enormous carbon footprint, carting the choirs all over the world, but says the project has bought carbon offsets. It will also symbolically plant around 150 trees in Australia in response to the bushfires. Our conversation returns to the heightened mendacity of political discourse today. He is appalled that the Enlightenment values he grew up with — he is now 49 — are diminishing before our eyes.
“In my childhood, truth was verifiable to a fair extent,” he says. “But it started off 20 years ago with climate change deniers, the first ones, and now we have fake news on Facebook and other sites. We have to explain to our children that the presidents and prime ministers (he is very specifically referring to the US and Australia here) and their admirers can lie and get away with it. And then say something completely the opposite the next day.”
We have to look for truth at a deeper level, he says, his hand hovering over his belly.
“If the politicians and their followers are creating such an untrustworthy world, then where do I find truth?” Some answers lie in the psalms, even though he doesn’t come to them thinking they are holy.
“No, it’s a genuine interest in mankind,” he says of his fascination. “If you’re genuinely interested in mankind, you have to read the psalms.”
150 Psalms will run from February 29 to March 3 at various venues around Adelaide as part of the Adelaide Festival. The 150 Psalms Exhibition will run from February 28 to March 27 at QBE Galleries in the Festival Theatre foyer at the Adelaide Festival Centre.
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