SACRED SPACES: A Midwinter Meditation on the Natural World

Alex Berko’s Sacred Place is an ecological service that connects the old with the new, the sacred with the secular, and the individual with their community. The outline of the work is a Jewish service. However, rather than Jewish prayers, the text is made up of various writers and thinkers who speak of the environment as a place of safety, comfort, and beauty. The six-movement piece, with texts by John Muir, Wendall Berry, William Stafford, and Rabindranath Tagore, is at times a meditation and at times an impassioned prayer for the world we inhabit and share.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is known for his sensitive renderings of the English countryside. His Mass in G Minor, though not explicitly bucolic in nature, is distinctly English, hearkening back to the spirituality of William Byrd and the textures of Thomas Tallis. The work, for unaccompanied double choir and soloists, was dedicated to Vaughan Williams’s close friend Gustav Holst, another English composer fascinated by the natural world.

Alex Berko, Sacred Place

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Mass in G Minor