Kyrie/Dark: Kyrie for Men

Music by Stephan Carlson

Kyrie/Dark is the follow-up to Kyrie for women, published in 2016. Kyrie itself is an edit and resetting of a Kyrie for mixed voices that I wrote in 2011, to memorialize the life of my recently passed grandfather. I regard both it’s first form and the Kyrie for women as “songs of sweet supplication”— earnest and heartfelt, and with a depth that is certainly true and substantial. Kyrie/Dark, however, is something else.

At the closing of an incredibly difficult chapter in my personal life, I wrestled with demons of bitter grief and crushed hope, simultaneously confronted by faults in my character. Kyrie Eleison means “Lord, have mercy”, it was for mercy that I was begging Him— more desperately than any other time in my life. And mercy would come, but it was not the sweet mercy for which I longed. I was not being called to the mercy of a change in circumstance, or the mercy of relief from heartache: I was being called to the much more difficult mercy of accepted loss, and personal change.

It was in the midst of this that inspiration for Kyrie/Dark found me. This would not be a sweet song of supplication, but a lament. Now, like the Kyrie for women, it’s interluding section differs from both of the other settings. And the concept and musical content therein is also inspired by a particular source— a dream.

Years ago, perhaps a year and a half after writing the first Kyrie, I had a dream in which I had discovered a cave full of prison cells. These cells were full of prisoners, and in the dream I knew somehow that these prisoners would never escape their prison. With no hope and nothing else to do, these prisoners sang a cacophonous lament on a single word: Alas. For years their music has remained in the back of my mind, and as I created Kyrie/Dark, I had found at last a place for it.