(+++) QUESTS FOR THE UPLIFTING

So Fragile, So Blue. William Shatner, vocals; National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Reineke. NSO. $20.98 (SACD).

Music for Chorus by Faith Zimmer, Christopher H. Harris, Dominick DiOrio, Reginal S. Wright, Lori C. Hicks, Erik Meyer, Lee R. Kesselman, and Kevin B. James. Elevation. Meyer Media. $20.

     The search for the ineffable, for the meaning of life, for something beyond any one individual’s time on Earth, is scarcely new; indeed, it may be the oldest seeking of all, the foundation of every belief system ever created and interpreted by members of the human race. Music has been an integral part of that exploration for millennia, and if the tools and harmonies and the very definition of music have evolved dramatically over the years, its underlying communicative ability and its use in an attempt to set the spiritual on a plane beyond that of everyday discourse remains essentially immutable. The fact that some forms of music communicate well, some less well, with particular audiences, that audiences are culturally and otherwise predisposed to absorb various musical forms with greater or lesser felicity, also remains largely unchanged – which means that a process of self-selection is inevitable when it comes to presentations designed as much for uplift as for entertainment.

     Two recent and very different recordings make this abundantly clear. William Shatner has parlayed his 1960s starring role in Star Trek into a multifaceted career that included a celebrated journey into space in 2021, when he was 90 years old. Shatner has expressed both wonder and a sense of grief at looking toward Earth from far above, saying that the grand overview “felt like a funeral” in the perceptual contrast between pervasive emptiness and the comparatively infinitesimal fecundity of our home planet. Depressive feelings do not translate well to Shatner’s form of entertainment, however, and he has channeled his experience and concerns into something more wistful and at least superficially more thoughtful in So Fragile, So Blue, a performance with the National Symphony Orchestra that is now available as an SACD on the ensemble’s in-house label. The primary composer of the works is Jherek Bischoff (born 1979), the conductor is Steven Reineke, but the focus is entirely on Shatner – which means that the disc, inevitably lacking a visual component, falls short of what the audience experienced when the material was recorded live in April 2022. The music, though, communicates in its own way – which will not be to all tastes. Shatner’s vocal delivery is not exactly singing, not exactly narrative, not really Sprechstimme. It is a kind of accentuated narration, akin to the original stage meaning of melodrama, in which verbiage is presented with clarity while musical material plays in the background as more of a scene-setter than a significant presentation element. So Fragile, So Blue thus rises or falls entirely based on Shatner and on listener response to his storytelling. “Music is everywhere,” Shatner proclaims at the beginning of this disc, and “each of these songs are [sic] autobiographical,” he says later. And at one point, referring to the people and things he has cared for in his life, he asks, “How do you reach out from the grave and tell them that you still love them?” Listeners whose feelings resonate with these thoughts will be predisposed to enjoy and become involved with Eight Days on the Water, The Meaning, Are You the Bayou? and the other songs here – with the material, always personal, becoming somewhat more charged with meaningfulness as this short (39-minute) presentation continues with I’ll Be with You and I Want to Be a Tree (“Don’t put me in a box…no headstone will I need…just plant me like a seed”). Inevitably, the material builds to the climactic title song, a nine-minute meditation on Shatner’s trip to the edge of space that opens, also inevitably, with snippets of the Star Trek theme music and of the TV show’s introductory lines – after which Shatner wonders whether he is now “a dream packaged and sold,” which of course is exactly what he is and has chosen to become. So Fragile, So Blue is more a self-tribute than a spiritual exploration, and if it can be difficult to disentangle its heartfelt elements from its purely commercial ones, it is at the very least a well-meaning, if superficial, “thought piece” about how it feels to be journeying together aboard Spaceship Earth.

     There is no comparable celebrity focus on a new Meyer Media disc featuring the 39-member vocal ensemble Elevation – which means the nine world première recordings on the CD must stand or fall on their musicality and expressiveness, not on the basis of who is presenting them. The disc draws its title from the piece by Dominick DiOrio, Are You Looking for Me? And that is a pretty fair summation of the CD’s overall content, in which contemporary composers reach for something beyond the mundane without necessarily finding it and, indeed, without always being sure just what they are seeking. The musical language of the composers is thoroughly modern when it comes to rhythms and vocal blends, but less assertively up-to-date harmonically, and in some cases, such as Faith Zimmer’s Laus Trinitati, there is a deliberate attempt to reach deeply into the past in furtherance of a contemporary desire to unearth the meaningful. This CD is not much longer than Shatner’s, lasting just 46 minutes, but its musical material is considerably more varied. Thus, Christopher H. Harris’ Were You There? is quietly expressive, DiOrio’s work features resonating chimes reminiscent of Balinese gamelan, and Reginal Wright’s Tides intermingles strings and other instruments into a gently rocking tapestry. Harris’ Joy Never Leaves – a second work by the only composer represented more than once on the CD – is somewhat overly earnest, and Lori C. Hicks’ Elevate is too self-consciously percussive in its attempts to be street-smart. But Eric Meyer’s The Gift to Sing is winning in its simple harmonies and expressiveness, Lee R. Kesselman’s Hymn to Time is oddly captivating with its rocking motion and lyrical flourishes, and Kevin B. James’ Worthy of All the Praise completes the CD with the clarity of a spiritual and stands as a summation of the uncertainties and hopes expressed throughout the recording. The vocal ensemble adjusts with apparent ease to the composers’ many and varied styles, and the singing is uniformly heartfelt if not always entirely clear verbally – although that is a matter resting more with the composers than with the singers. In addition, a few of the composers undermine their own musical effectiveness by virtue-signaling their societal bone fides through references to contemporary social or sociopolitical issues – an approach that, of course, may resonate with listeners who happen to share those composers’ specific concerns and predispositions. Ultimately, modern spiritual seekers will not likely find all the different forms of thought, hope and questioning on this disc equally appealing or meaningful, but the CD contains enough musical variety so that it will reach out effectively, to a greater or lesser extent, to contemporary audiences engaged in the same sort of seeking for greater meaning that has preoccupied human beings and inspired musical expressiveness since time immemorial.