Inside joke?
Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 9:23 pm
New music is sometimes hard for me to grasp. I was listening to St. Olaf on WABE tonight and heard a most remarkable acapella piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Part. The music is interesting but the text is rather tedious. It is straight out of the new testament, a section that has always been skipped over in any Bible study class I ever attended. It is the last half of the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke. The genealogy of Jesus, all 75 generations. The title is appropriately, "Which was the Son of". This repeats exactly 75 times with a different name at the end each time. Does anyone know this piece? I am both amazed that someone would attempt this text, must have been a bet at a college drinking contest, and fascinated that a choir would actually attempt to sing it. Of course St Olaf can sing anything, but this too must have been on a dare. I fooled him though, being an instrumentalist I never listen to the words anyway, so I rather enjoyed it!