Music Notes The Martyrs Project arrived in my mailbox around the time all of us collectively gasped at the Sandy Hook headlines. Little kids settling in for a day at school. Teachers suddenly herding them into lockers and closets. Twenty-six shot dead. It felt like appropriate timing—an album seeking to weave the grief of death (ghastly and violent) with the hope of eternity and resurrection. Healing despite the loss. Hope despite the momentary triumph of evil. The disc is a unique, 10-song collaboration between Michael Glen Bell and Duane W.H. Arnold—scholars, musicians, writers, friends—who reworked the prayers of Christian martyrs (some their last utterances on earth) into compelling songs with the help of a few of Christendom’s finest contemporary artists: Phil Keaggy, Jennifer Knapp, Margaret Becker, etc. It’s a smattering of musical persuasions harmonized around the brutal narratives of stalwart believers facing death for the sake of their Savior. The project is a valiant effort to link the often obscure stories of martyrs—women and men who for most of us are an abstraction shrouded by antiquity, obscure circumstances, and the funny names of far-off places—to our mp3 players and headphones and morning commutes. A fresh bridge to a Salvadorian bishop who took bullets on behalf of the poor (“Romero”). A new tether to 19th-century Korea, where to be a believer once meant statesanctioned torture and beheading (“Ri”). Bell and Arnold’s music is at its best when the strings stand alone and do their sad, heavy
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strings and vocal chords, and settle me in for a long dark night of the soul. To be fair, however, despite being so sonically mercurial, this disc has some remarkable highs. The anonymous prayer of victims from a Nazi concentration camp is resurrected in a spare acoustic duet by Bell and Knapp: Remember, courage…/Remember, remember, remember, Greatness of heart. It is perhaps the project’s plea. Don’t forget, it says. We have died for our convictions. Yet we look to God despite everything, because of everything, and even in the moment of death we see his smiling, weeping, glowing face. And then there is Phil Keaggy’s stunning guitar solo in the waning moments of “Carpus,” which seems to ask in its sad notes the foundational question of the whole album: Would I die for my faith? Or rather, what would I be willing to die for? The bishop Carpus, almost 2,000 years ago, was burned alive by Roman authorities for his simple answer: I am a Christian. Sorry, won’t recant. Keaggy’s fluid notes have brought the bishop’s ghost into my living room. He’s sitting here now, shaking his head. Heavy times. He points at the computer’s newsfeed. Anne Marie Murphy, 52, a special education teacher, stood between the shooter and her students. Her body was found draped over her kids. Mary Sherlach, 56, mother of two daughters, ran toward the gunman even as he fired. “She considered what she was doing as God's work,” said her husband. “That's all you need to know about her.” Bell and Arnold have given us a treasury of ancient prayers that feel entirely prescient. The words of Clement in AD 95: “We beseech You to help and defend us, we beseech You to help… uplift those who have fallen, be the portion of those in need.” I can only say, Amen.
Josh MacIvor-Andersen is a freelance writer and assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Mich.
Martyrdom of St Stephen by Bernardo Cavallino
The Martyrs Project
work. Lots of cello and acoustic guitar and violin. Bell’s voice feels appropriately sparse and raspy and, at times, wonderfully defiant: “I will worship only my God,” he sings, echoing Quirinus as he stood before Roman authorities bent on wiping out this new scourge of vibrant faith. “This world cannot take You from me, no power on earth can make us part.” But the album takes some unfortunate turns, particularly when the guitars are plugged in and turned to what I can only assume is the “crunchy” setting on the studio’s amplifier. In “Sadoth,” for example, a song recounting the vision of a 4th-century Persian who stared down a Zoroastrian Shah and refused to worship his sun god, the music is a bombardment, replete with shrill guitars and rock and roll drums thumping in obligatory 4/4 time. I’m suddenly reminded of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” a fine anthem for Tom Cruise shooting Soviet MiGs out of the sky but, for me, a weird frame for the final haunting words of a man envisioning his own bodily sacrifice: A ladder is before me, surrounded by light,/ It stretches from earth to heaven./ I am called by my friend,/ To climb and not to fear, I will not fear. I don’t know, maybe it’s perfect. I just wish the guitars would stop screaming at me. And while I get the fact that such a spectrum of contributors probably demands a diversity of aesthetic, there’s something about these narratives—these prayers—that begs for a little Gregorian chant. Something solemn and holy and full of ache. You get a taste of such things in “Bonhoeffer,” a song based on some of the last words of the Lutheran pastor who was hung after attempting to assassinate Hitler. A bell tolls. A single piano plunks in a minor key. The austere, a cappella harmonies of very serious men kick in. But then it sounds as if members of Linkin Park suddenly show up, push the choir out of the way and, yes, start crunching away on their guitars. I would have simply asked them to wait at the door. Perhaps it’s just me, but the theme of this album—underscored by the theme of recent headlines—makes me feel old and morose, and all I want to listen to these days is Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, sans Fenders and Yamahas and Rolands. Give me