Described as “alluring, sparkling, thoughtful, and carefully crafted” (Augusta Read Thomas, Director of The Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition), Seoul-born Chicago based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬 [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ], pronouns: he/him) crafts music that entwines the acoustical nature of sounds with clarity, pathos, and reinvented classical expressions. Embracing the joy of rendering ludic permutations or interstellar sonic fables, he aspires to reach the human spirit through epistemic journeys. The dual identities of his backgrounds, a Korean immigrant living in the States, a born Catholic and learned Buddhist thinker, and a composer with a computer science degree, also greatly influence his musical language. He finds inspirations in spiritual, literary, and scientific elements, encompassing a diverse range of topics from Borgesian poetics and Jungian Philosophy to Number Theory, Deep Learning, and Engineering Campanology, oftentimes employing yearlong in-depth interdisciplinary research.

Bio from Lee’s website

Whenever I attended Mass, probably when I was around 14, there was a magical moment with a golden hue. As an altar server at the time, I had the privilege of observing this timeless moment from the closest distance. It was during the Eucharist, when the priest raised his hand and took the role of Christ, saying “Take, all of you, eat of this.” At the heart of this ritual, I rang a bell when the priest’s hands reached their highest point. Lastly, when the priest recited the words “through him, with him, in him,” I couldn’t quite explain the feeling, but I always loved and admired the mysterious aura of the altar and the ceremony. For me, Mass was more like a spiritual play than a religious ceremony.

When Kirsten approached me in the summer of 2023 with her vision of creating a new mass setting inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’, I saw an opportunity to do something profoundly meaningful for myself and the world. It allowed me to engage in what I love most and address what I care about deeply. This was particularly significant at a time when the world was revealing new meanings to me, as I viewed it from a diUerent perspective with my growing child.

Since childhood, I have been deeply concerned about the climate and plastic crises. Whenever I saw plastic utensils and packages, I always thought about the future 1000 years where the abandoned plastic crumbles will be travelling. I invented the term “climate-blue/plastic-blue” to describe my endless pessimistic thoughts. It is truly shameful to see the immense amount of plastic waste, including Styrofoam dishes and plastic utensils, generated at almost every event I attend in this country, including recent elementary school events. This issue struck me even when I first arrived in the country 18 years ago at JFK airport, and regrettably, nothing has changed.

In 2015, Pope Francis shared a message in his encyclical, Laudato Si’ where he deplored: “The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22).” In the treatise, Pope Francis addresses the present ecological crisis not in overly poetic and spiritual ways. Instead, he analyzes the crisis in somewhat a cold, practical, rational, and scientific manner, aiming to confront it directly, understand its true nature, and promote ecological education and spirituality. He emphasizes the importance of engaging deeply with the best available scientific research as a foundation for ethical and spiritual growth. Pope Francis suggests looking to St. Francis of Assisi as a guiding example “par excellence of care for the vulnerable”, whose life and teachings oUer valuable insights into living harmoniously with the environment.

In this mass, I aim to follow Pope Francis’ approach in his encyclical. Initially, I want my message to be direct and straightforward, removing euphemisms, metaphors, ornamentations, and indirect symbolisms. As Pope Francis emphasized, the environmental crisis is not just about politics and economy—it’s about our lives. He noted: “It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance.”

Since the summer of 2023, I have been collecting texts from various sources, including poems by refugee poets such as Syrian poet Abdullah Kasem Al Yatim (used with permission from Shivaji Das, a former representative of the Malaysian Migrant Worker Poetry Competition. This poem was featured on the UNHCR website on World Refugee Day, with whom I have also communicated), Buddhist death poems, and public speeches by Greta Thunberg. One of her speeches at the EU Parliament on April 16, 2019, was impactful: “Our civilization is so fragile. It is almost like a castle built in the sand. [...] We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and the extinction rate is up to ten thousand times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day.”

The first movement, Kyrie eleison, is an overture in the form of musical theater, where multiple musical dramas and events coincide. It includes the sound of a melting glacier, which is spouted from the Schumann resonance (chord) of the earth—an electromagnetic low frequency ‘breath’ of the earth. It also features desperate narratives of already extinct, dying, or critically endangered species from the RedList, morphing spectrograms of consonance and vowel changes in the sounds of Kyrie—[k] [iː] [r] [i] [e], and Buddhist-chanting-like callings in the ‘Christe’ section. In Buddhism, one of the most prevalent ways of chanting is repeatedly saying the name of Amitābha, similar to the Catholic’s Holy Rosary Prayer. The movement also includes an iridescent pastoral heterophonic melody in the ‘elesion’ section, which itself demonstrates the lush continuum of changing spectral profile in its sounds.

All of these quite apocalyptic musical sceneries are supported by the overall dramatic and harmonic soundscape of the movement, reminiscent of the meteoric outpourings of the Dies irae openings of canonic requiems. I wanted my students, who will participate in the performance of the first movement, to sense in their bones and appreciate the bodily rawness and vitality of the music, engaging in musical ‘activism’ that hopefully ignites the non-dead green futures still living in their hearts. All the text that I employed in Kyrie eleison is cited from the RedList website at www.iucnredlist.org with their permission, and from A Prayer for Our Earth by Pope Francis.

Missa Laudato Si’ is dedicated in admiration to Kirsten Hedegaard, and the first movement, Kyrie eleison, was given by The EcoVoice Project, Loyola’s Ignatian Voices, University Chorale, and University Singers, conducted by Kirsten Hedegaard, at the Madonna della Strada Chapel on April 21, 2024. The entire mass is planned to be world-premiered on October 2024.