Missa In Tempore Belli, In Tempore Belli

On Saturday, April 25, 2026, the Cornell University Glee Club and Cornell Chorus presented this year’s Major Works Concert. The concert’s headliner, Joseph Hadyn’s Missa In Tempore Belli, or Mass In Time of War, was fortuitously chosen– or was it? Was the strongest force that drove America into this year’s conflict in the Middle East situated not in Foggy Bottom, Arlington, or even, uh, elsewhere, but in the Cornell University Music Department, seeking thematic autonomy through a policy of titular hedging to underlie one of this year’s strongest performances? Absolutely not– fact checkers all agree that the Engineering Quad is absolutely not on the verge of building a nuclear weapon. But all I’m saying is, the war broke out on February 28, and the Cornell choirs started rehearsing the Mass weeks in advance. Let the facts speak for themselves…

The concert started out with the Chorus alone performing Indonesian composer Ken Steven’s Cikala Le Pong Pong, a piece with lyrics originating from the Pakpaknese culture, in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Beginning with a soloist gliding over and weaving through a luminous sus chord, the piece sharply dives into a driving rhythm. According to a translation of the lyrics into English, the original text is a parental injunction to their daughters telling them to be more ladylike, a profound warning sorely… uh, nevermind, my editor’s not going to like that.

Next was Mary Montgomery Koppel’s A La Lune. This piece, a setting of a William Carlos Williams poem of the same name, plaintively calls out to the moon for it to “Pardon us our troubled quietnesses” and “All halting tendernesses”. This call is not the ready and anticipatory “Now Come, Fire!” of triumphant Teutonic daybreak; instead, the call is an apologetic near-supplication coming from one whom in the midst of “little journeys endlessly repeated” can never seize the day, but is, like the moon, condemned to “nooning by night.” Here, the moon is not a comforting guardian dispensing wisdom; instead, it is a fellow-traveler, who, due to shared experience “must have understanding of these things” which so overshadow the speaker.