Composers Datebook

Over the centuries, hundreds of composers have set the Latin prayer, “Ave Maria” – the “Hail Mary” in English – to music. The best-known music versions are by Franz Schubert and Charles Gounod, but there have been settings ranging from William Byrd to Igor Stravinsky. On today’s date in 1997, the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the premiere performance of a new unaccompanied choral setting by the American composer Morten Lauridsen. Lauridsen was born in the Pacific Northwest in 1943, and worked for a time as a Forest Service lookout on an isolated tower near Mt. St. Helens before studying composition at the University of Southern California. By 1997, he proved be one of the most oft-performed choral composers of our time. His music is deeply rooted in the great choral tradition. One critic, writing of Lauridsen’s “Ave Maria,” said it “recalls the sumptuous polychoral music of Gabrieli as well as the rich textures of Brahms’s music for unaccompanied chorus.” In a 1989 interview, Lauridsen said, “I think all of my music is deeply spiritual. I tend to be one who feels a part of a great whole on some level ... when I go off in my summers ... to [a] remote island off the coast of Washington [state], I’m able to commune with a greater sense and greater being, or whatever one might call it.”