A Missa Brevis for Jumping Timelines

Abstract

Jean-François Charles’s Missa brevis Abbaye de Th​é​l​è​me interleaves texts of the Mass Ordinary with French poems from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. These poems interpret the mass texts, and conversely the mass texts weave the poems into a rite, and a ritual space. The album sonifies the gargantuan, utopian abbey described by the ex-Franciscan friar François Rabelais in the first book of Gargantua and Pantagruel (ca. 1532). Rabelais’s Thelema Abbey is the basis of Alistair Crowley’s Thelema spiritual movement, the sole principle of both being “fais ce que voudras” (the first words on the album). I show that the poems’ supplementation of the mass texts in their musical context evokes the will aligning one with divine love. I explicate this supplementation with reference to sympathetic elements in the exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Charles’s mass triangulates us between (1) a heartfelt search for God in the midst of war and inner turmoil (highlighted in the Sanctus and Benedictus), (2) a conflict between unloving zealots and willful iconoclasts (spelled out in the Kyrie and Agnus Dei), and (3) a utopia of divine love (seen especially in the Gloria and Credo). Dick similarly shares actual memories of alternative timelines, triangulating us between (1) a so-called “black iron prison police state world” in which Christianity is illegal (2), this world, partially good and partially bad, in which we and Dick exist, and (3) a paradise presided over by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In listening to / visiting the mass/abbey, to borrow a phrase from Gurnemanz in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, “time becomes space.” Through the mass’s prayer, we can aim to jump timelines, as if they were arrayed in space, making Arcadia more real for us, at least for the duration of the album, if not permanently.