SATB chorus, chamber orchestra augmented with tenor sax and drum kit (1999)

In 1999 the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra commissioned me to write a mass—this one. I didn’t follow the typical mass scheme of Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei and instead wrote a Processional, followed by the Kyrie, Sanctus and a concluding Benedictus-Agnus Dei. Because the title included “mercury,” I’d considered giving the text a physics spin along the lines of Einstein’s E=mc², where E is energy, m is the Roman Mass and c is the speed of light, but the rhyming structure got overly abstruse and the time signature only made sense to quantum theorists.