Catalogue Connection: 21143

Issued in the late summer of 2025, Conspirare’s advena: liturgies for a broken world has never felt more relevant than right now. While the word advena (Latin for “stranger” or “foreigner”) resonates for its associations with migration, displacement, and exile, the other part of the title references the fracturing of justice and collapsing of partnerships occurring throughout the world. Set to texts by librettists Leah Lax and Euan Tait, four works by Houston-based composer Mark Buller are presented by the GRAMMY®-winning choral ensemble Conspirare and its Artistic Director and conductor Craig Hella Johnson on an album that addresses the strife of contemporary living whilst also holding onto the possibility of hope, recovery, and transformation. Words by Johnson included with the project have proven to be particularly prescient: “We find ourselves in a pivotal cultural moment—one that calls for expressions of beauty and truth, offered both for inspiration but also as acts of resistance.”

On the sixty-six-minute release, two short settings, Introit: Fruit of Your Heart and Communion: A Questioning (Tait), frame the multi-movement liturgies Mass in Exile and Requiem in the Light (Lax). The contemplative, chant-like bookends ease the listener into and out of the release and enhance its thematic design and structural arc whilst also helping induce states of calm and reflection. The core liturgies reconfigure ancient forms through contemporary prisms in expressions that are emotionally intense, thought-provoking, and permeated by urgency. Bringing the works into being are the choir ensemble—on this recording, six sopranos, five altos, four tenors, and five basses—and instrumentalists Patrice Calixte and Mariama Alcântara (violins), Bruce Williams (viola ), Douglas Harvey (cello), Marc Garvin (guitar), Jessica Valls (bass), and Thomas Burritt (percussion). Solo turns are taken by vocalists Simon Barrad (bass), Emily Yocum Black (soprano), and Michael Hawes (bass). Whereas some choral ensemble recordings understandably use the non-vocal contributors as a backdrop, here their contributions are pivotal to the compositions and the music’s impact.

That’s immediately apparent when Introit: Fruit of Your Heart opens with the lilt of unaccompanied acoustic guitar, which establishes a gentle portal for the singers’ becalmed utterances and unison harmonies. In rapid succession comes Mass in Exile, which similarly begins with non-vocal elements, in this case string remonstrations that start broodingly before swelling ferociously. Political developments provided a strong impetus for Buller’s seven-part mass, with, in his words, its creation “born out of years of frustration and disillusionment coming to a head in 2016, when the people from my fundamentalist background made a choice a full 180 degrees from what they’d taught me as a child—that morality matters in political leadership.” The exiled alluded to in the opening “For Want of Refuge (Miserere)” are the children separated from their parents at the Texas border, a detail that instantly grounds the mass in our traumatizing real-world context. Desperation, longing, and anguish pervade the choir’s declamations, after which “Credo in Exile” returns the work to a peaceful state with the choir softly intoning a guitar-accompanied chorale on the words “Pray child, pray.” Barrad steps forth with spiritual self-questioning, his spotlight affecting in its sincerity and confessional character. Again we’re reminded of the important role the instrumentalists play when the strings re-enter alone until they’re replaced by the choir’s earnest supplications and a moving second turn by the vocal soloist.

After “Peaceable Kingdom Gloria,” a tender paean to human love, brings an episode of heavenly luminosity to the work (“Don’t fade, my love – I hear your song”), reality raises its harsh head once more via the vituperative “As Water Flows Away (Prayer for the Government)” and its scathing accusations (“Do you think you speak justice?”). A second, inward-probing “Mercy (Kyrie)” and prayerful “Earth Sanctus: Body and Blood” follow, the latter marked by choral repetitions of the Hebrew word kadosh (“holy”) and then with Barrad “Holy Holy Holy,” before the mass concludes with “When All Else Falls Away (Benedictus)” and an entrancing reflection delivered by Hawes, the choir, and a soprano duo.

Presented in five parts, Requiem in the Light forms a seamless companion to Mass in Exile. The seriousness of its subject matter is announced by the haunting “Lacrimosa for the Murdered” with its expression of longing and angst-ridden vocal tapestry. Buller again bolsters the material’s impact using instrumental elements, strings central to the opening movements. “Confutatis: Morning Light” sustains the music’s haunting tone with musings on the hope a new day engenders. Quick to blossom is the gently rhapsodic “Prayer to the Body (Domine Jesu),” while the penultimate “No Trumpets: Prayer to the Earth (Dies Irae)” offers an elegiac, multi-lingual plea to undo the damage we’ve done. After a glorious major chord ushers the “Requiem (Agnus Dei)” and the work proper to a close, advena ends with Communion: A Questioning, where Black, a section of singers, and strings gather for one final luminous meditation.

In concert with his librettists Lax and Tait, Buller has crafted powerful and enriching choral material for Conspirare and Johnson to perform, such works important for their probing spiritual dimensions but also their real-world applications. While they acknowledge directly the darkness of our times and this so-called broken world, they don’t rule out the possibility of recovery, no matter how remote it might currently seem. To despair over the way things are is understandable, but it’s hardly the only course of action available.

Texas-based composer Mark Buller must have been thrilled when embarking on this project with Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare, as having the opportunity of working with arguably the finest professional choir in the United States doesn’t really come around all that often for any composer. The results here clearly advance the reputations of all involved, and re-affirm the status of Conspirare as just described.

Butler’s music is relatively conservative in its tonal and textural language, but where it succeeds where so much other recent American choral music utilizing similar methods fails, is in its sincerity of purpose as well as its greater sophistication of execution. In all of this, Conspirare’s focused sound and impeccable intonation, diction, blend, and flexibility allow Butler’s music maximum opportunity to shine. The contributions of all of the instrumentalists involved in the project—while perhaps not on quite the same level as the singing—are also effective, and the album as a whole is both emotionally and aurally rewarding.

There are two significant works on this program and two smaller works designed to bookend the larger compositions. I personally felt the short opening Introit: Fruit of Your Heart was the weakest piece on the program, and the wandering opening solo guitar line did not come over as well as it might have on account of the tendency for some of the notes (especially higher ones) to speak more loudly than others. The singing is predictably excellent, but for me the piece really didn’t go anywhere. The closing Communion: A Questioning, on the other hand, was much more interesting, especially on account of the octave unison writing for voices, which actually doesn’t happen very much, and is deceptively hard to bring off even remotely as well as achieved here.

The two larger works on this program, Mass in Exile and Requiem in the Light, aim to bring a fresh and contemporary take on those two traditional choral forms, and in this regard both succeed admirably. While there is much that is reflective in these works, there is also plenty of contrast, and I found the longer movements of each work to be particularly effective in sustaining structural integrity—and therefore the listener’s interest—rather better than is often the case with very new music. Particular highlights were the Miserere and the Earth Sanctus of the Mass in Exile, as well as the Lacrimosa of the Requiem in the Light.

As mentioned on a couple of occasions above, there are a few moments when the instrumental contributions here are not quite up to the exceptional standards of the singing, and another of these comes at the very end of the Requiem in the Light, where the high strings just before the final choral chord are not quite in tune, which is a shame as the writing here is quite distinctively luminous, and the effect is just fractionally tarnished.

The recording itself is quite lovely, with nice space around all of the performers and a particularly warm and inviting choral sound. The balance of the guitar against the other forces has been impeccably handled, and the various solo vocal contributions are especially well caught in believable perspectives. Production values in the accompanying booklet are excellent.

This is an album of contemporary music that I think will have wide appeal, not just to aficionados of choral music, but also to a broader cross-section of music lovers, perhaps not even only “classical” devotees. Many such folks might also find a surprising element of comfort in difficult times here, and that alone is cause for celebration. Strongly recommended.

Although two librettists and four pieces of music by Mark Buller are involved here, they make a coherent whole. Introit: Fruit of Your Heart is to a libretto by Euan Tait; the larger Mass in Exile and Requiem in the Light have words by Leah Lax; and the final Communion: A Questioning brings us back to Tait.

The search for the light is a thread that winds through many religious systems. “Advena” is the Latin word for “stranger,” or “foreigner.” We are, posits Buller, living in a fractured world: distanced from ourselves and each other, and from the natural world. Introit is for choir and guitar; with the guitar performed here by Marc Garvin, who plays with a lovely sense of clarity. It is an “entering” into the two principal works and is clearly influenced by Plainchant (with guitar “commentary”). There is also a sense of questioning from the guitar, with the choir offering its response.

Mass in Exile came about as a response from the composer to the intermingling of religion and politics, and the amplification of that nexus. Mass in Exile again features a solo instrumentalist, this time violinist Patrice Calixte. The solo baritone represents the composer himself. It begins, though, with choral cries for “Mercy” against active, emotionally destabilized strings in the first movement, “For want of refuge (Miserere).” The text asks, “Where, is He, where is God?” Simon Broad is the fine singer here, burnished of voice; in contrast, “Credo in Exile” begins gently, on guitar. This is music of great beauty, exemplifying the dissonance of the invitation to pray and the world around us. Michael Hawes has a light edge to the upper part of his voice that works perfectly here, almost as if there is an edge of desperation. The choir acts as a massed invitation to the perceived solution (prayer). Buller has a very varied palette, and he uses it intelligently: from filmic to liturgical, the music’s trajectory is never in doubt. The choir, Conspirare, is simply superb (multiply reviewed in the pages of Fanfare, just never previously by myself).

The Gloria is entitled “Peaceable Kingdom” and opens with another gentle guitar solo. The text is a beautiful, erotic love song, Conspirare offing honeyed sound (appropriately, given the text). Buller achieves a sense of heart-centred music without tipping over into sentimentality. Calixte and percussion open “As water flows way (Prayer for the Government)” in highly contrastive fashion, with the percussive sounds indicative of prison bars; and then, at last, “Kyrie,” with its thought-provoking twist: “If I have no mercy, who am I? … if not now, then when?”

The “Earth Sanctus,” beginning with a closely-scored choral cry on the word “Kadosh” (holy), features bass Simon Barrad, offering a lovely, rounded voice. But it is Buller’s harmonies, so luminous, that are most impressive here: they glow with an inner reverence. The word “kadosh” also opens the Benedictus, “When all else falls away” (the text later quotes poet Yehuda Amichai). The Benedictus is clearly a place of peace, Hawes blanched at “When world and words fall away”; the music turns star-encrusted at the final entreaty for “peace without words.”

The Requiem in the Light pulls us absolutely into the present, but asks us to consider our past in “Lacrymosa for the Murdered.” The final words reference Jesus’s crucifixion, “perhaps the ultimate child murdered by the state,” as the booklet notes put it. There is an urgency here as the choir sings “Where did you go?” the pulsings possibly redolent of a fibrillating, anxious heartbeat. The “Confutatis: Morning Light” finds repeating string figures holding a kind of vibrancy against the long choral lines.

“Prayer to the Body: Domine Jesu” is a cry for freedom, and after that initial cri de coeur, the music cascades out until out of silence emerges a fine cello solo, lachrymose itself, by Doulas Harvey. All of the music so far has been expressive, and within a large envelope: but none has been expressive in the way of say, Verdi’s Requiem. So how will Buller set the “Dies irae”? Even Fauré’s Requiem has a measure of assertiveness here with those syncopated horn octaves. Buller’s response is the most (for this listener) touching moment of the entire disc. The text talks of our “shattered earth,” “receptacle of our poisons / and our rage.” The text clearly plays on an unyieldingness of spirit (“I will not yield”) and the giving up of the corporeal shell at death (“But when I yield” is the very next line, “Please / hold me. / Enfold me”). It is great writing, and Buller sets it beautifully, segueing into the final “Requiem (Agnus Dei)”: “This life / will be / a requiem / for an /unfinished song.” The setting of “song” is glorious, blazing with light.

And so to the epilogue to the disc; “Communion: Questioning,” and back to Tait’s text. A solo female voice opens. The words are beautiful, offering up the “risk of loving and being loved.” Interestingly, during the storm of life, love answers “softly / Not with rage or Dies irae”; which links rather interestingly to the previous piece.

A very moving album, well performed, recorded, and annotated. More, Buller’s music reaffirms music’s crucial role in reminding us who we are, and what is important. Recommended.

Advena: Liturgies for a Broken World presents choral works by the Houston-based composer Mark Buller. The performers are the choral group Conspirare, led by the ensemble’s artistic director and conductor, Craig Hella Johnson. In addition to the mixed chorus, Conspirare includes a chamber ensemble of two violins, viola, cello, bass, guitar, and percussion. For Fanfare, I previously reviewed Conspirare and Johnson’s impressive artistry as featured in a Delos CD (3601) entitled House of Belonging (Mar/Apr 2024, 47:4). The two main works on Advena are Buller’s exploration of the Mass and Requiem. Buller composed his Mass in Exile following the 2016 U.S. presidential election: “when the people from my fundamentalist background made a choice a full 180 degrees from what they’d taught me as a child – that morality matters in political leadership.” In collaboration with author Leah Lax, Buller created a work in which the various sections of the Mass address both current events, and the eternal search for a meaning in faith. Over time, according to Buller: “The Mass became a vehicle for catharsis, even hope.” Mass in Exile explores “the myriad ways in which we experience separation and exile.” There is the specter of government-imposed separation: children taken away from their parents at the Texas border. The composer’s own struggle with distance from his faith, and his search for connection to God, are voiced by a baritone solo. The closing Benedictus quotes poet Yehudah Amichai on the quest for peace: “Let it come/like wildflowers,/suddenly, because the field/must have it: wildpeace.”

Requiem in the Light is a “companion piece” to Mass in Exile. The opening section, Lacrimosa for the Murdered, is a litany of the killings of innocent children, culminating in a reference to the crucifixion of Jesus. Personal reflection leads to a Prayer to the Earth (Dies Irae): “Dear tired earth/receptacle of our poisons/and our rage…I will not yield/But when I yield/Please/hold me./Enfold me.” At the close of the Requiem, life is characterized as “a requiem/for an/unfinished song.” In both the Mass in Exile and Requiem in the Light, Mark Buller offers lyrical and often hauntingly melodic settings of Leah Lax’s texts. There is a marriage of classical and popular expression, with minimalism playing a role, especially in the instrumental writing. Buller also makes effective use of both vocal and instrumental solos. Two short Buller works that offer a similar musical profile to the Mass and Requiem—Introit: Fruit of Your Heart and Communion: A Questioning—serve to open and close the disc.

Conspirare sings Mark Buller’s music with radiant beauty, affecting dramatic involvement, and clear, precise diction. Buller’s colorful, diverse instrumental writing is beautifully served by Conspirare’s strings, guitar, and percussion complement. The CD booklet includes extensive program notes, and full sung texts. Fine performances of searching, communicative works. Recommended.

Mark Buller ponders a host of moral issues in these works performed by the sterling choral ensemble Conspirare. The repertoire includes Mass in Exile, which probes alienation, immigration and global disarray, and Requiem in the Light, an expression of anguish and hope in the face of genocide and existential threats.

So much darkness might prompt a listener to shy away from the panoply of lamentations and sadness but Buller is a composer who knows how to imbue feelings with ample warmth, colour and tension that keep the ear immersed in his sonic worlds. The musical language is largely tonal, with some roots in sacred choral traditions, yet with sufficient harmonic pungency to provide underpinnings of meaning to Leah Lax’s empathetic, urgent texts in the two extended works.

A number of the movements in Mass in Exile begin with incipits played by solo guitar that lead to pleadings for compassion and understanding. Buller, who escaped a fundamentalist upbringing, has cast a bass soloist as himself trying to reconcile his religious disorientation. The seven movements are varied in atmosphere and texture, with choral lines that radiate from myriad directions and instrumental writing for strings and percussion full of dramatic and rhythmic implication. In the final movement, ‘When all else falls away (Benedictus)’, the chorus fades away as if paying homage to the ending of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (in the same key, C major).

Hushed unison humming and sliding tones introduce ‘Lacrimosa for the Murdered’, the first of five movements in Requiem in the Light. Throughout the piece, the music closely reflects the messages in the texts, from glowing utterances to episodes of utter grief. Buller employs voices and instruments with subtle skill.

The large works are framed by two shorter scores, Introit: Fruit of Your Heart and Communion: A Questioning, lyrical evocations of texts by Euan Tait. Conspirare, led by founding Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson, respond to all of Buller’s emotional gestures with utmost cohesion and flexibility, and the soloists – basses Michael Hawes and Simon Barrad and soprano Emily Yocum Black – are first-rate.

Advena is the stranger in a crumbling world. This is likely how the album title and recorded works of American composer Mark Buller should be understood.

The text of Mass in Exile describes the world as a wreck. Buller embeds these emotional landscapes in liturgical chants and prayers that are as stirring as they are contemplative. It never gets really loud. « No Trumpets » is the title of the Dies Irae in the Requiem.

The composer works across genres to express searching, questioning, and praying through music. In the introductory « Fruit of Your Heart, » thoughtful, meditative guitar sounds are featured. Buller composes the Miserere with restless rhythms and introduces the various sections of the Credo in Gregorian mode on guitar. These are then joined by repeated Hebrew sounds. Mark Buller successfully combines all these elements.

However, the Texan vocal ensemble Conspirare carries this appealing interpretation above all with their exquisitely balanced sound, which brings the necessary emotionality and intimacy to the works.