We just added the Stabat Mater by Tyler Versluis. It was composed for the Lenten season at Saint Matthew’s Anglican Church in Etobicoke, Canada in 2022. Like many other composers, his motivation behind composing a Stabat Mater lays in his desire to take part in a tradition, both religious and musical. The gorgeous settings of the Stabat Mater text, by composers such as Szymanowski, MacMillan and Poulenc were role models, but he was also eager to express his own aesthetic and spiritual convictions. Mr. Tyler was kind enough to send me the excerpt of his Stabat Mater. Asking for his motivation to compose this Stabat he wrote me:

Carpentry and wood-based artisanship have been in my family for several generations, and the simple, mournful wooden figures of the Pietà and the Pensive Christ, common in central-European Catholic folk traditions, served as a visual icon to the composition. Like these wooden figures, I was composing as if I was carving from a living substance, freeing the objection of devotion in order to communicate direct and heartfelt emotions without abstractions or intertextual derivations.