Music

Something extraordinary is coming in 21 concerts from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, beginning March 28 in Orem, Utah. (See dates and locations here. https://www.millennial.org/performances/ ).

Think 3^rd Nephi, the story of Christ coming to the Americas, produced like Les Miserables. The Millennial Choir and Orchestra, under the direction of Brett and Brandon Stewart will be presenting the largest and most ambitious project in their history that will also include guest artists, Gentri.

Imagine this story of Christ being presented in the finest concert halls, with original music, a fully costumed cast, remarkable lighting, and music so passionate and spiritual, it penetrates to the depths of your soul.

Imagine 1400 participants in one hall, bringing beauty to you in surround sound, as choirs with singers from age 4 to adult undulate in and off the stage and the highest seats in the theater so you have music on all sides. Imagine being transported from this sometimes tiring world into heaven for a couple of hours by the performance and original music of gifted musicians whose purpose is to convey the love of Christ.

If this sounds like lavish praise, it is because I have been to MCO’s concerts many times before and have left, like so many others, just shaking my head in wonder that their music was so profoundly moving. Come to a concert where everyone is abuzz with excitement and then hear music like you have never heard before.

Brett Stewart, composer of the show said, “In nearly three decades of composing music, we’ve realized that when you take scripture and give it a musical voice, that experience stays with you for a lifetime. The youth of the world need it in their lives, families need this in their lives. We are passionate about rekindling and strengthening the faith and testimonies of this generation.”

The story begins in Jerusalem where Jesus taught, “Other sheep have I which are not of this fold: them I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (John 10:16). A melody is played behind these words that becomes a theme throughout the show, reminding the listener again that Christ’s whole point is to gather his sheep into one fold.

This message resonates with the performers who are in the choir, both those who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and those who are not. They say that they can feel Jesus’ tender love as they sing of this story. The words of scripture, embedded in music plays through their minds again and again while they learn and perform the songs, having a powerful impact on them. Fix breakfast and the words of 3rd Nephi are humming through your mind, if you are a member of the choir. It is an invitation to a deeper spirituality.

Beethoven said that music is the language of God and Brandon Stewart added that the aim at MCO was to create and perform music that helped listeners connect to a real God and a real Savior.

To create a production as complex as this has put demands on their 35-member staff and 100’s of volunteers. They have created 5,000 costumes, lighting design and an elaborate stage set, whose large Meso-American temples will be trucked from performance to performance across many states.

Steve Porter who has designed and created the sets spent 350 hours carving a single Styrofoam stela, which was a copy from the original ancient artist. He has wondered how long that original work, carved in stone, must have taken for the artist who had no power tools.

Kristi Ward, MCO’s artistic director and a sister of the Stewarts, has visited two states each week for the last eight. She has carried much of the heavy load in making this into a stage play. Recently she was with a hundred highschoolers in the choir in a room in Dallas, prepping for one of the most inspiring moments of the show. They were so ready to go home, but as they sang, exhaustion drained away and was replaced by tears of testimony.

“I love the different emotions that you feel as our participants play their roles. They face the despair of having been beaten by the Gadianton warriors, the great storm, the humbling process of repentance through Christ appearing. To see this array of scenes will take an audience on a monumental journey.”

Highly Trained

Brett and Brandon are both highly trained musicians. Brett received a doctorate degree in choral conducting from the University of Cincinnati and Brandon received a masters from Juilliard. Though he was invited to complete a doctorate program and teach at Juilliard, he decided to join his brother in founding MCO.

Why would either of them be willing to take such a risk when life was offering them other tantalizing opportunities? Didn’t they have families to feed? Before Brett called Brandon inviting him to join the founding of MCO, he had checked around and found that every other Latter-day Saint choir, apart from the Church and BYU, had conductors with day jobs.

Starting MCO was not going to be a part time job or a side gig for these talented musicians, but their full focus—and they were not going to start by having their choirs singing at a local church but in a concert hall. The vision that stirred them was great. They made no small plans.

Some people said to Brett, “What you are doing is unbelievable. I don’t know if it is guts or if it is ignorant.” Brett’s answer was, “I just don’t know anything different than to tackle stuff. Once you have decided you just do it.”

The fire that lit them was the product of their noticing a deficit in the music world. Something was lacking. Brandon said, “We noticed a huge need for not just spiritual music, but high-level spiritual music.

“There was high-level music happening, of course, in symphonies and universities across the nation, but the more our world grows away from spirituality, the more we see that spiritual music was performed with an apology. What I love about what we do with with MCO is unapologetic, and we’re proud to praise God through music.”

“The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square do a wonderful job and the BYU University has just one of the best choirs in the world. These are two organizations who are absolutely nailing it. But it’s a wide world, and there are many people searching for spirituality and they are searching for God and music is one of the fastest way to connect with deity. The organizations who are doing it are doing so well, and we need more of it to feed more people.

“We are living through the greatest faith crisis of our generation. Singing or playing the music is a way of helping them build their faith again and have a faith-affirming experience.” That is a job not to be taken lightly.

The MCO conductors, Brandon and Brett and six others, have the challenge of working with talented, auditioned choirs and orchestras, as well as youth and children as young as four. Their work is so remarkable because they reach beyond the borders of usual expectations.

Book of Mormon Oratorio

When MCO was barely begun, Brandon began working to persuade Brett to write a Book of Mormon oratorio. Brett said, “I didn’t have a desire or a thought to do it, but Brandon asked me out of the blue, and then asked and asked again, and I resisted for months.

“He said, ‘Do you agree that somebody needs to do it?’” Brett agreed that somebody did, and both Stewarts were well aware of Spencer W. Kimball’s famous talk on the Gospel Vision of the Arts where he said, “We are proud of the artistic heritage that the Church has brought to us from its earliest beginnings, but the full story of Mormonism has never yet been written nor painted nor sculpted nor spoken. It remains for inspired hearts and talented fingers yet to reveal themselves.”

For Brett, thinking he could be one of those “inspired hearts and talented fingers” seemed presumptuous, and thus he resisted. Yet finally, Brandon found the question that was the tipping point. “If not you, then who? You have a choir and orchestra. Why not just go for it? You can be one of the first and then it can inspire others.”

“OK, I can go with that,” Brett thought. The ideas for a musical project on the Book of Mormon marinated in his mind with lots of ideas for months and months before he ever put pen to paper. “It just has to sit in your soul and heart and mind,” he said.

Then in the summer, he was in the bow of a boat at a family reunion and ideas began to flow to him about music for the great storm in 3 Nephi. Finally, before the 2010 performance he wrote the entire thing in three months for the MCO in California to perform, and a year later recorded it. It went to the top of the Billboard lists as number one on the classical music chart.

Then years passed without doing much with the oratorio, and finally on a road trip in 2019, Brett pulled out the Book of Mormon oratorio to listen to again. That was a rare thing because a composer rarely listens to his own music, but he had the distinct impression, “This needs to be performed again.”

When Brett and Brandon talk to each other and one says “I feel inspired about this”, they don’t take it lightly, because it is not common. Their plans were to perform it in 2020, and then COVID happened. Everything was canceled.

It sent them back to the drawing board, and they decided to make it a bigger deal, telling the story of Christ in America with all the trappings of a big stage play. Both decided that the oratorio needed to be rewritten to be more accessible to a larger audience.

Why do this? Brandon said, “We live in a different world than we did 25 years ago, and, as incredible as the masterworks in the oratorio style are, people don’t connect as much as they once did to that kind of music.  That’s what we realized. This music and the story from the Book of Mormon can reach a wider audience in a more popular way, but still be high quality. We retained some of the melodies and the incredible text, but changed much else.

So, Brett began composing. “There are several ways that music comes to you and faith-based composers say similar things. You could be sleeping in the middle of the night, and wake up in a cold sweat with an idea and run to your office to write this down.”

“Sometimes it is like those old movies where you see someone at a typewriter with a garbage full of crumpled up papers beside them. Sometimes you are on your own and it’s numbing and mindless. Then there are moments when things come to me and they would just be laid out in my mind.”

“The music singing behind the annunciation of Christ in the Americas just came to me in totality with all its melodies and intricate harmonies. There are songs I felt like I painstakingly created. This one just came. It’s as if this has been penned before and I am familiar with it. I think, ‘This one I’ve heard before. I know this one.” Some others in the choir have also come to me and said, ‘I’ve heard this before’.

This is where the people are hearing a voice in the darkness, and the Lord says, “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified should come into the world.”

“I don’t know where it came from” Brett said, but “it isn’t me.} It just dropped into my life. I have a very firm belief that we have seen and heard things in the pre-existence that transcends the veil that we carry with us.”

The flip side of that Brett said, “is that when you try to do a good thing, you feel Satan’s power potently. All these participants will say that they don’t remember having this much adversity in their lives. That happened to me when we had five children and my wife broke her ankle. I compose from home and people were in and out of our home all day, while I was trying to cram and get the music done.”

It was too many interruptions to keep the flow of a creative work, and Brett was getting worried.

“You know in the Book of Mormon where it speaks of being compelled to be humble? I was humbled and I fell to my knees. During my prayer, I remember saying out loud to the Adversary, ‘You will not win this battle. I will not be conquered. I will not let you win.’ It felt powerful and spiritual and I was allowed reprieve. I was able to go back to work without anxiety.”

An Early Start

For Brett, as a child and young teenager, composing was the natural expression of his identity. He took piano, and sometimes, tired of the regimen, he would sneak away and find a quiet corner and compose instead. With his first job, he bought manuscript paper at the music store, but hid his compositions under his bed. One day his mother, was making his bed and found the pages of composition, and asked, “What is this?”

He told her, it was a full orchestral score. She looked and saw there was a measure that noted that this was where the horns came in, and she asked, “How do you know when the horns come in?”

Brett answered, “I hear it. I did then, and still do to this day, I don’t know where the music comes from. It’s just there. I came with it.”

Because he has a personal connection to it, Brett was equally as intentional about his love of the Book of Mormon. “It’s the keystone of my testimony. It’s so humbling to me. I remember as a teenager struggling that I had never had an ah-ha answer from the Spirit. It was really concerning to me. I loved this work. I loved the church. I loved seminary. My scriptures were marked until the pages were torn even before I went on my mission.” His fear about receiving no ah-ha moment, no burning of the bosom from the Spirit were calmed when he was told in a blessing that his testimony of the work was etched deep in his soul never to be erased.

It was a moment when he acknowledged that he had always known it.

A Working Relationship

Brett and Brandon, as the duo behind the founding of MCO, and their sister Kristi, who is doing the artistic design that makes Messiah in America possible have a remarkable working relationship. They dream, they talk, they create, and they are honest with each other.

Brett and Brandon will bounce their compositions and arrangements off of each other and they are frank. They say things like, “You are going down a rabbit hole with this part of the composition. It’s just not working.” No matter who is being scrutinized, nobody is offended, because they trust each other’s instincts and knowledge. If this newly-composed section of music doesn’t work for your brother, it won’t create the connection with the audience the Stewarts so highly value. They trust each other’s talent and vision.

What it means is their work is supercharged with faith, and they have been particularly situated to speak of “this sacred story of divine love, unbreakable faith, and the dawn of a new covenant” that marks Christ’s visit to the Americas.

What they hope is that those who see Messiah in America will feel the healing power of Jesus Christ, and that in a world that is so often divided, they will know that the Lord hopes to create one fold with one shepherd.