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In intact societies, people organize their lives around regular rituals that celebrate all manner of milestones and life-transitions. Many of these rituals have evolved over generations and incorporate our most important teachings about the human character, our families and communities, and the role that spirituality plays in our day-to-day lives. Our rituals also reflect and encode our shared social metaphors and generally reinforce the societal power structures of the group that promotes them.
The music/video pieces collected in Secrets, Dreams, Faith, and Wonder form a ritual of thanksgiving in five parts: (1) a lament of surrender, (2) the reading of the lesson, (3) the celebration of the ritual, (4) the recitation of the creed, and (5) a hymn of benediction. When looked at this way, it closely mirrors the structure of the Catholic mass as well as other rituals of gratitude celebrated throughout the ages and across cultures and religions. The motivation for Secrets, for making a new mass for the new millennium, is summed up in the following paraphrased quote from the late Joseph Campbell, “Those who have heard the rhythms and hymns of the angels, who have understood any of the words of the angels, will try to recite those hymns in such a way that the angels will be attracted.”

Stephen Travis Pope (soundtrack composer, videographer, producer) is a composer, computer scientist, videographer and social and spiritual activist based in Santa Barbara, California. He has realized his musical works at studios in America (Toronto, Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara) and Europe (Paris, Salzburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin). His music is available from Centaur Records, Perspectives of New Music, Touch Media, SBC Records, Disc-O Records, and the Electronic Music Foundation, who released a triple-disc anthology of his work called Ritual and Memory in 2007.

Stephen was educated at Cornell University, the Vienna Music Academy, and the "Mozarteum" Music Academy in Salzburg, Austria. He has taught and conducted research at Mozarteum, Stanford University, the Technical University of Berlin and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1995-2010 he was on the faculty of the University of California Santa Barbara, first in Dept. of Music, then the Dept. of Computer Science, and finally in the Graduate Program in Media Arts and Technology.

In intact societies, people organize their lives around regular rituals that celebrate all manner of milestones and life-transitions. Many of these rituals have evolved over generations and incorporate our most important teachings about the human character, our families and communities, and the role that spirituality plays in our day-to-day lives. Our rituals also reflect and encode our shared social metaphors and generally reinforce the societal power structures of the group that promotes them.
The music/video pieces collected in Secrets, Dreams, Faith, and Wonder form a ritual of thanksgiving in five parts: (1) a lament of surrender, (2) the reading of the lesson, (3) the celebration of the ritual, (4) the recitation of the creed, and (5) a hymn of benediction. When looked at this way, it closely mirrors the structure of the Catholic mass as well as other rituals of gratitude celebrated throughout the ages and across cultures and religions. The motivation for Secrets, for making a new mass for the new millennium, is summed up in the following paraphrased quote from the late Joseph Campbell, “Those who have heard the rhythms and hymns of the angels, who have understood any of the words of the angels, will try to recite those hymns in such a way that the angels will be attracted.”