The Catholic Art Institute is pleased to present a conference on sacred music

The Golden Tapestry - Spiritual Orientation of the Catholic Sacred Music Tradition

August 3, 2024

St. John Cantius Parish Hall

10:30-11:30 am

Free Event with Request for Donation

Synopsis: Early in the history of the Church, Augustine and Boethius provided us a framework by which to discern the objective reality of beauty. How can we understand and discern Beauty via this framework, and how has the Catholic sacred music tradition pursued this "Musica Universalis" since its inception?

This conference will be presented by Composer Dr. Mark Nowakowski and Richard Childress

Join us in the parish hall for coffee and refreshments after the 8:30 am first Saturday mass.

*This ticket is for the sacred music presentation only. If you'd like to attend His Majesty's Men Choral Concert at 7:30 pm on Aug. 3, please purchase your tickets at the door or online here: https://www.ticketsource.us/hismajestysmen

Mark Nowakowski is a composer whose works represent a thoughtful merger of bold expression and mystical contemplation, Slavic pathos and American individualism. His music has been commissioned and performed globally by such notables as the Kronos Quartet, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Silesian Quartet, Three Notch’d Road, Composers Inc, His Majesty’s Men, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, Orkiestra Camerata Stargard, The Cleveland Chamber Choir, Band of Voices, Stowarzyszenia Mozart, the Canton Symphony, Vox Musica of Sacramento, the “Chaps” Choir of Poland, the Choir of the Shrine of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, the choirs of St. John Cantius in Chicago, the Cracow Brass Quintet, and many others. He currently serves as the composer in residence for His Majesty’s Men, and the director and producer of the Vos Omnes Virtual Choir.

His debut album on Naxos, “Blood, Forgotten” was praised by Gramophone Magazine for its “intense emotional worlds” with “writing that is at once fierce, haunting, and mystical“, while evoking “dramatic and psychological atmospheres as if Bartok and Shostakovich were looking over [Nowakowski’s] shoulder, but with his own sense of urgency, rhythm, and color.” Reviewer David Denton writes that “Mark Nowakowski has positioned himself among the cutting-edge composers” with this album release. His second portrait disc – Metanoia – quickly reached #1 on Amazon’s new classical list.

Beyond the classical and sacred music worlds, Nowakowski has also selectively worked in documentary film scoring. His score for “Discovering Tolkien” was shown internationally on EWTN, while his score for “Mass of the Ages” has become part of a viral hit which has garnered millions of views worldwide.

In 2011, the Kronos Quartet premiered his “String Quartet #2: Grandfather Songs” at the International Festival of Polish Music in Krakow. In 2012, he was the composer in residence for Projekt Mozart, seeing his “O Pieknosci Niestworzona”’ premiered in a concert tour of seven Polish cities culminating in Czestochowa and Warsaw. In 2008, he served as the Composer in Residence for the Canton Symphony Orchestra. His writings have been published in Sacred Music Journal, Sound on Sound, onepeterfive, and at newmusicbox.org. Most recently, he contributed a chapter to “Composing for the Screen” (Hallgren, Focal Press).

Mark received his Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Maryland, where he also won the biennial Walsum Award for Excellence in Music Composition. He holds a Professional Studies degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he was Assistant Director of the CIM New Music Festival and was awarded the Donald Erb Prize in Composition. He holds his Masters from the University of Colorado and two undergraduate degrees from Illinois State University where he graduated with honors in both Music Theory and Arts Technology. His main composition teachers include Paul Schoenfield, Daniel Kellogg, Mark Wilson, Margaret Brouwer, Larry Moss, Steven Taylor, John Drumheller, and Michael Theodore. He has taught at the University of Maryland, Christendom College, Benedictine University, and DuPage College of Illinois and is currently Associate Professor of Music at Kent State University at Stark.

Richard Childress has been a professional singer and choral conductor for 40 years.

He grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, USA, and received his undergraduate music degree in composition from St Olaf College, Minnesota. He has spent over half of his life living and working in Britain as a professional singer, where he has performed and recorded with Oxford Camerata (Jeremy Summerly) and Taverner Choir of London (Andrew Parrott), among others.

He has sung eight times per week for many years with the Choir of Winchester Cathedral under conductors David Hill and Andrew Lumsden, while also appearing as a guest conductor in Sweden, Spain and the USA. From 1998 to 2005 he was founder and artistic director of the Winchester International Early Music Festival, which brought some of the finest British and European artists to Winchester each year.

Over the years, choral singing and conducting engagements have taken Richard to nearly every country in Europe, Scandinavia, the USA, Australia and Brazil, and he has sung on some 30 recordings for Hyperion, Virgin Classics, Argo, Naxos and RCA.

Richard has twice been invited to Toledo, Spain as a conductor, most recently in 2014 by the “Festival de Música El Greco en Toledo” to prepare and conduct a choral concert of Renaissance music in the historic church of Santo Tomé. From 2013 to 2018, Richard served as choral clinician for the Sacred Music Summer Choral Course in Chicago, which involved forty teenage singers in the St John Cantius Youth Choir program.

His abiding passion is the sacred music of Renaissance and Baroque Spain, together with its performing traditions. 

___________________________

We are delighted to bring this enriching conference and concert and grateful for those who are able to make a donation. Your support goes a long way in helping us continue to offer such high quality programming.

We look forward to seeing you on August 3rd!