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Commissioning a Stained Glass Installation

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This article gives helpful advice for planning or commissioning a stained glass work, describing the process that might be used and important decisions that need to be made by both the artist and the commissioning congregation.

Stained glass, from its origins, has been an integral element of church architecture because of its inherently dynamic qualities. While it stimulates our visual senses, it stirs us emotionally toward a more reverential sensitivity, encouraging introspection and contemplation. Stained glass complements the liturgical action by infusing the place and people with a heightened sense of purpose.

However, like all aspects of building or renovation, the successful use of stained glass depends on careful and thoughtful planning. These notes will focus on the steps involved in commissioning stained glass work rather than aesthetic or stylistic considerations.

The Parish Team

A committee or task force for procuring stained glass should be formed early in the design of the project to work with the building team and the parish as a whole. This group is best comprised of a member of the building or renovation committee, the architect, the pastor or a representative, and several interested parishioners who reflect the diversity of the congregation but who are also knowledgeable in the arts. Five to seven members is a good size. This team is then charged with the selection of the artist or team of artists, with design review, parish communication, and cost control. (Editor’s note: We would encourage parishes to include an art consultant on the overall building/renovation committee. This person would also be included on the task force dealing with stained glass.)

The committee should begin by learning at least a bit of the history of stained glass and by visiting stained glass installations in the area to familiarize themselves with the scope of the medium. Then they are ready to determine the role of stained glass in their building. Important factors are:

  • Purpose: e.g., to express ideas, beliefs, feelings
  • Light: e.g., aesthetic effect, control, level of brightness, emphasis, color
  • Effect: e.g., quiet, calm, meditative, exciting, dynamic, joyful
  • Expression: e.g., realistic, symbolic, abstract
  • Style: e.g., attitude toward traditional or contemporary

Artist/Studio Selection

The committee can go to an independent artist/designer, or to a studio with a staff artist/designer. There are arguments to be made for either. The committee should consider both possibilities. Sources for learning about possible candidates include the architect, other churches, local arts organizations, and national organizations such as SGAA and IFRAA.

Initially, the committee should request from each candidate a brochure describing the person’s work, slides, and photos, a resume with references, and a list of previous commissions. By reviewing these materials, the committee can reduce the number of candidates to a manageable few. Each of these should then be invited for an interview. At the interview, the committee and the artist view and discuss the artist’s work; the committee shares with the artist their thoughts about the parish’s project, about the process, and possibly about the concept. The committee should inquire about costs, insurance, length of time for design and production, background and experience of any other persons who would be involved through the artist.

This selection of an artist should be made as soon as possible after the schematic (preliminary) design of the building or renovation so that the artist/designer can collaborate with the architect during the further development of the design. This allows for a high degree of integration between stained glass and the building itself.

Contracting the Artist

After the selection of the artist or studio, the relationship between the artist/studio and the parish (owner/client) should be set down in a contract. A complete contract usually involves the following:

  • Well-defined scope of services to be performed by the artist/studio
  • Description of the work and responsibilities involved in performing the scope of services
  • The work schedule and temporal conditions of the work’s performance
  • The cost/fee for the contracted work and an explicit payment schedule
  • Any terms or conditions that are peculiar to the project

The Design Process

The stained glass design process begins with a contract that commissions the artist. (Note that sometimes people suggest that the artist be selected by means of competitive [and unpaid] design submissions. This begins the design process before the artist is a member of the team and thus removes the possibility of productive interaction between the artist and other team members. The result of such competitions is often inferior art, and the whole process is unfair to the artists who are not selected.)

The first phase of the design process begins with meetings between the committee and the artist to share perceptions of the role stained glass will play in the project. The artist then initiates preliminary designs for the committee’s consideration. This process does not imply that the committee tells the artist how to design. Rather, the shared impressions and the interaction help the artist to become more sensitive to the character and personality of the community being served.

From these discussions, the artist prepares the final designs, preferably in a transparent form so that the effects of transmitted light are better understood. It is also beneficial if the artist provides a sample panel, or prototype, that demonstrates the materials and techniques that are proposed for use in the windows.

Upon approval of the final design, the committee’s work is essentially complete, although visits to the studio during production may be warranted and helpful. The success of the installed windows is, to a great extent, the result of the work of parishioners and building team members through their involvement in the early phases of the process.

The Style of Israelite Music

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It is difficult to determine the style of biblical music. Recent studies and discoveries, however, are resulting in an improved picture and expanded understanding of music in ancient Israel.

The crucial task in determining matters of style is one of identifying relationships that are found in available music and that can be shown also to have been present in music that is not available. Through a combination of linguistics, history of culture, and comparative musicology, discoveries have been made that make this possible to a considerable extent. Excavations have produced ancient instruments from Ur, Kara-Tepe, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as well as from Israel. Liturgies, in whole or in part, from Sumer, Akkad, Egypt, and Ugarit, have been reconstructed. Finally, comparative musicology has endeavored to examine the most ancient melodic elements of the Near East and to set forth criteria for their age and locale.

As a result of all these efforts, certain distinguishing characteristics of Semitic oriental music may be identified (Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development [New York: Schocken Books, 1967]): (a) modality—this is not to be confused with the later Western use of the term. A mode comprises a number of motives within a certain scale, each of which has different functions. The resulting composition is an arrangement and combination of these motives; (b) ornamentation—the modes and their motive partials are, within the arrangement of the modality, subject to ornamentation and decoration, often very florid and extended. To a large extent, this depends on the skill and training of the singer, whose object it is to keep within the perimeters of the mode itself, while at the same time enhancing its basic profile with ornaments. The contour of such ornamentation is basically steps-wise; skips of more than a third are rare. Thus the style is eminently vocal; (c) rhythm—all music is rhythmic in the sense that its sequence of tones is subject to virtually infinite temporal variations. Metrical music is that which is subject to regularly recurring, equally divided measures.

Within each of these, rhythmic development takes place. Semitic music lacks regularly recurring meters. Nonetheless, it is freely and richly rhythmic; its rhythmic structure is as complex as its ornamentation. In fact, it may be said that rhythm is to meter what ornamentation is to scale; (d) scale—the general nature of melody is diatonic, although this is mixed with a certain feeling for quarter tones, a distinctive which is foreign to most music to which we are accustomed; (e) monophony—Jewish music is unharmonized and depends for its beauty on elaborate ornamentation of the melody alone.

Occasionally, in group singing, intervals of fourths or fifths appear, more out of limitation in vocal range than because of an inherent harmonic vocabulary. However, it probably is true that the natural acoustical compatibility of these intervals allows for departure from the unison and therefore gives room for speculation as to the relation of this kind of primitive harmony to the development of harmonic procedures. When vocal music was instrumentally accompanied, heterophony (a way of embellishing the basic melodic line with concurrent decoration) was often employed; (f) improvisation—the performer and composer were the same person. The modal formulae were elaborated upon, as discussed above in connection with modality and ornamentation. A combination of long training and inherent ability were necessary to accomplish this.

For several centuries, musicians sensed an essential identity between archetypes of Christian chant and Hebraic counterparts but were unable to substantiate this until recently. The French musicologist Amadé Gastou established the first concrete evidence and support of this. Then Idelsohn was able to establish the essential identity of certain melodic archetypes in the Yemenite tradition with the earliest Gregorian chant. The significance of this is that the Yemenites had left Palestine during the beginnings of Christianity and have remained isolated from contact with the church ever since.