Visaggio, Mike: Starship Universe

Popularizing sacred music -- not unlike the revolution in sneaker design -- while having a nakedly commercial component, in this case seems most interested in just sharing personal enthusiasm while simultaneously spreading The Word. But as part of the larger tradition, as composed in Medieval Plainsong and Polyphony, through the Baroque and Classical and Romantic eras up to and including the contemporary works of Tavener and Pärt, those composing or reinterpreting sacred music (re: Gavin Bryars' excellent Oi Me Lasso) establish their forms through the study of texts, an awareness of the tradition and the unquestioned necessity of providing continuity while reinventing with contemporary ideas. Compare the tranquil melisma of any plainchant with the instrumental fury of, Mozart's Requiem to the underlying dissonances fighting for air in Avro Pärt's Te Deum and you'll see that, whether you're with the Monkees (I'm a Believer) or not, sacred music of any period often remains largely reliant on those techniques codified during the Romantic era (major = good, minor = bad, the bassoon represents Doubt, the oboes, Radiance... that sort thing) and then innovating with greater and greater levels of nuance and sophistication. But despite the efforts of countless faithful down through the millennia, music and the demands of music took hold over its subject long ago. Not least when composers consciously broke with the Roman Catholic Church's ruling that all music must be vocal music in the service of god because instrumental music was, originally, deemed both sinful and an offense to god.

The fact remains that sacred music, like pretty much everything, is utterly dependent upon context. There is nothing intrinsically sacred about it other than saying it is, and any individual exposed to sacred music outside the context of the belief system that labeled it as such will reassuringly hear nothing more than, you got it, music. And, depending on the size of the gap in time and in cultures, maybe not even that.

Mike Visaggio shows us what happens when religious enthusiasm collides with an enthusiasm for Emerson Lake & Palmer. His playing is solid and the overall sound is convincing and expressive of a youthful zeal. The structures are familiar and will be appealing, even reassuring, to any number of fans of mainstream progressive rock. Yet Christian Rock or Christian Prog seems to be a form of mere appropriation, avoiding the tougher road taken by those mentioned earlier who consciously pushed new forms to optimally suit what they intend to express. Singing about god on top of a riff vaguely reminiscent of bits of Tarkus doesn't develop enough of a context to be taken seriously as one -- sacred -- or the other -- rock.

But the genuine issue is one of originality and of praxis -- that is making the form as appropriate to the subject matter as possible -- and on that measure the whole category fails. So, given the long history of sacred music, Starship Universe can only be classified as vulgar -- in the archaic sense meaning "of the common people". A meaning that was so essential to Liege and Lief and the great Chain of Being when Western sacred music first began to take shape.

Track Listing
1) In the Nazarene Church
2) Prelude No. 2 for Piano
3) My Elder's Son
4) Blues Variation
5) 2001: Also Rocked Zarathustra
6) Starship Universe
7) The Synchronized Life
8) On the Ship of Emotion
9) Music's Coming to Us

Added: June 13th 2007
Reviewer: Kerry Leimer
Score:
Related Link: More Information
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Language: english

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