Matthew Peterson: The Sanctuary Mass
Högalidsmässan/The Sanctuary Mass was commissioned for the 100th anniversary of Högalid Church in Stockholm. The text of the mass are poems by the pastor of Högalid Church, Gunilla Lindén, inspired by the building itself – the sanctuary. In 2024, Matthew Peterson was awarded the Christ Johnson Prize for Högalidsmässan: "A major sacred work that, in both its accessibility and artistic design, connects to the great mass repertoire but with its own contemporary tone."
Now, Högalidsmässan is available in an international edition: The Sanctuary Mass, with German and English lyrics translated by Florian Benfer and Ingrid Eng. Read more and browse the score here.
Saturday, October 3 at 9:00 PM, St. Thomas Church, Leipzig: The Sanctuary Mass will be performed by the Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir, Leon Tscholl (organ), the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Florian Benfer. The concert is part of chor.com, Europe's largest convention for choral and church music, and will be broadcast on German radio in October. During the convention, there will also be a reading session where the audience is invited to sing The Sanctuary Mass together with the Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir and ask questions of Matthew Peterson.
On November 13, Proprius will release the album *Högalidsmässan*, recorded at Högalid Church by the Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir, Leon Tscholl (organ), members of the Royal Swedish Orchestra, and conductor Florian Benfer.
Read more about Matthew Peterson at gehrmans.se
Matthew Peterson on Högalidsmässan/The Sanctuary Mass
Reflecting on The Sanctuary Mass (originally Högalidsmässan, The Högalid Mass), I am reminded that composing music has less in common with a predictable science like chemistry than it does the magic of alchemy. Often my musical copper remains copper, but sometimes it transforms into gold, and I don’t understand exactly why. The Sanctuary Mass belongs to that latter, more rare category. Perhaps a Biblical metaphor is more appropriate. The Sanctuary Mass is a work where musical clay received the animating breath of life.
In fall of 2021 I was contacted by church musician Benedikt Melichar, inquiring if I would compose a work for choir, organ and chamber orchestra for the 100-year anniversary of Högalid Church in Stockholm in June 2023. I had been recommended to him by Florian Benfer, conductor of Gustaf Sjökvists Chamber Choir. The work would be a mass with original text by pastor Gunilla Lindén, composed for the church’s amateur choirs and chamber orchestra, plus professional brass quintet and organist Nils Larsson, and conducted by Melichar. The congregation funded the commission, which would be a gift to the Swedish Church, and they therefore requested it also be published in a reduced choir and organ version that could be performed in whole or in part by churches around the country. Futhermore, the work should be directly inspired by the spaces of the newly renovated sanctuary and the artworks featured in them, and utilize different positions in the church in performance!
While I feel I do my best work under limitation, I was initially concerned about the burden of requirements. However, I found clarity in my collaboration with Gunilla Lindén, a writer with the rare combination of humility, intellectual rigor, thoughtfulness and integrity that in my experience is only found in a good Lutheran pastor. Gunilla started by giving me a tour of the church, then under renovation. One of Sweden’s foremost examples of the National Romantic style, I was inspired by the building’s stark grandeur, powerful yet graceful lines, and clear, elegant simplicity. I hear this inspiration in the very opening of my mass: stark brass chords like high, vaulted, sunlit pillars, the organ reverberating like a great, shadowy sonic space.
Gunilla’s original text in Swedish was her poetic reimagining of the mass liturgy. Throughout, it contrasts the mystic, unfathomable, eternal Divine, with an intimate, tender personal God. Something very familiar from my Lutheran background, and well-suited to my own somewhat bipolar musical voice, oscillating as I do between extroversion and inwardness, the sublime and powerful juxtaposed with the fragile and delicate.
I composed The Sanctuary Mass rather quickly, in the four months October 2022 through January 2023 (I recall finishing the editing of parts and score following my son Björn’s birth on February 3rd). Knowing I was composing for an amateur choir and orchestra, I sought to compose very “streamlined” music, eschewing empty virtuosity and avoiding lazy complexity while aiming to stay true to my voice and the material. No “dumbing down.” This often took very specific forms in the choir, like a narrower vocal range, limiting divisis, and approaching difficult harmonies in simple ways. But also in deeper, more fundamental ways: by keeping things stripped-down – textures, melodic lines, forms, notation – I hoped to leave space for the performers’ own musicality. I strived to give each movement a distinct energy and emotional thrust, and I felt this would be clear enough for the musicians to be confident. Composing the Mass was a watershed moment for me as a composer, for this reason.
Looking at the score now, three years later, I am struck by the prevalence of textures and forms from the rich, millenium-long tradition of church music: imitative counterpoint, chorale homophony, antiphony, ritornello, isorhythm, the many canonic treatments. I don’t recall these traditional aspects being so conscious on my part. It was probably a result of subconcious musical fluency, answering to the demands of the text’s subject and form, and my conscious desire to compose very focused and clearly. Several examples stand out: the Kyrie sounding in layers of canon from a seven-tone series (heard succinctly in the organ ostinato), the Credo’s poignant chaconnes, chorales, and choral fugato, and the earnest prayer song of the Benedicamus. Yet other episodes belong to other, more idiosyncratic musical worlds: the Sanctus’s shining, syncopated, minimalistic dance, Gloria and Laudamus with its pounding polymetric groove and soaring rhapsodic melodies, the dissonant bells, dark deep harmonic pools and flowing melodic rivers of the Agnus Dei.
The world-premiere of The Sanctuary Mass in June 2023 was met with an immediate standing-ovation from a full Högalid Church which lasted for many minutes, Gunilla and I taken aback. Since that first performance, that powerful response has been replicated in other productions of the work, which has resonated as strongly with professional musicians as it first did with amateurs. It has been translated into English and German, and we will soon release the recording, made Maj 2025 in Högalid Church. I now consider The Sanctuary Mass one of my finest works. I am grateful and humbled that I succeeded in crafting a space for that special alchemy: where the elements of musical score, musicians, space and audience can combine to create something magical and meaningful, a great and moving architecture in sound and song.
- Matthew Peterson, Sep 7 2026