by Robert Firpo-Cappiello
Michael Kaulkin’s Misterium Tremendum, a 12-minute piece for orchestra composed in 2000, evolves from the quietest possible hum and the faintest hint of movement to a crashing, frantic climax. Inspired by his image of the individual facing the infinite, Kaulkin, a composer whose work is heavily informed by the theater, wanted to communicate “a sense of the conflict among the various emotions around awe, ranging from exhilaration to dread.” Kaulkin came across the title of the piece while reading the work of the novelist and essayist Carl Sagan. Sagan believed that a fleeting moment of understanding, in which the individual grasps the infinite, could bridge the perceived gulf between religion and science, because, for all their differences, religion and science both seek to understand and explain the unexplainable. In his novel Contact, Sagan invokes the term misterium tremendum to describe this moment of understanding.
Like much of Kaulkin’s music (for example, the multimovement choral work Cycle of Friends and the clarinet/piano duet American Standard), Misterium Tremendum evolves much as a drama does. The experience of hearing the piece for the first time is rather like hearing the work of a great storyteller, full of surprises and moments of grace and whimsy, as the orchestra builds from near-silence to a roaring climax. Its central conflict concerns the tension between two musical themes: an aggressive fanfare that is heard in the brass near the opening, and the lyrical theme that first appears at about three minutes into the piece. Like the composers of the Classical era (who typically composed pieces around two contrasting themes) and the composers of the Romantic era (whose melodies and rhythms often represented specific emotions or dramatic situations), Kaulkin takes his listeners on a journey through a musical landscape, in this case one that is at times familiar and at times utterly self-referential.
Kaulkin’s palette is characterized by extremes of dynamics, texture, and mood, and by a progression from transparent string-and-woodwind textures to thick brass and explosions of percussion. Although Misterium Tremendum is a unique piece of 21st-century concert music, Kaulkin’s work, like that of all artists, bears the influence of certain forebears. In this case, one may hear echoes of American composers such as John Adams and Leonard Bernstein, as well as the early modernists Maurice Ravel and Jean Sibelius. The piece’s approach is at once modern (we are surrounded by a kaleidoscope of orchestral color, pithy percussion, and evolving rhythms that create the illusion of gathering speed) and traditional (Kaulkin, an experienced choral composer, is drawn to melodies and motives that breathe, rise, and fall in the manner of the human voice). Starting with what Kaulkin describes as “white noise”
