Critical Mass (2025)

Critical Mass is my attempt to linger with the enduring structure of the Mass and with its continued capacity to speak to the world as we meet it now. The traditional sequence gives us a scaffold that is both familiar and porous, something that can hold doubt as readily as praise. My own Agnus Dei, written for the Coronation in 2023, sits at the centre of the work, and the other movements were written around it for chorus, strings, percussion, and harp. I asked four long-standing collaborators, John Caird, Colm Tóibín, Marcus Omari, and Alice Goodman, to create new texts for the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, and Sanctus. They wrote independently, without seeing each other’s work, and with only the simplest guidance from me about where their movement would fall within the whole.

What emerged was a set of texts that, quite unexpectedly, speak to each other. John Caird’s Kyrie wrestles with our capacity to create and destroy, ending with a plea to be “able to create ourselves anew.” Colm Tóibín’s Gloria then opens not with transcendence but with a low grey sky over Venice, and finds renewal in the “light that binds the image to the air,” as though answering the Kyrie’s search for re-creation with a moment of clear perception. Marcus Omari’s Credo continues this thread, grounding belief in the “sacred pulse of presence” and in the making of beauty “for the sun and moon to witness,” which echoes the Gloria’s attention to light and its generative force. And Alice Goodman’s Sanctus, with its “Illuminations,” returns us to light once more, transposed into the ordinary and the local, where heaven and earth briefly flare into view “as far as the eye can see.” None of these correspondences were planned, yet they form a kind of shared contour across the movements: a movement from fracture to perception, from presence to illumination.

As I worked with these texts, I found myself thinking about the Mass not as a fixed liturgical form but as a living framework that continues to shift according to the time in which it is heard. We are all moving through unsettled times, and it felt important that the music make space for clarity and opacity, for translucence and weight. My hope is that these movements offer small invitations to reflect on how we attend to one another, how we recognise beauty and danger, and how we imagine responsibilities that extend beyond the self. In this sense the piece circles quietly around the idea of a shared moral imagination.

To close the work, I added a short text of my own, Go, which acts as my version of the Ite, missa est. It is rhythmically charged and forward leaning, more of a release than a benediction. It sends the piece back into the world with a sense of momentum, as if to say that whatever light has been glimpsed here does not end here, and must now be carried outward by those who hear it.

Tarik O'Regan
San Francisco, 12th December, 2025