Devotions / 2022
violin, cello, & harmonium
commissioned by longleash (Pala Garcia, John Popham, & Julia Den Boer)
video/audio︎
score︎
supported by New Music USA
recorded by longleash, August 13, 2022 at The Loretto Motherhouse, Nerinx, Kentucky
Medieval motets are like little jewels, crystalline structures of multiple sung lines. Each carries several different texts, a mix of Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular. Love songs and pastoral odes are braided with liturgical chant, revealing the loving and libidinal side of worship. These texts are tangled in unabashedly beautiful harmonies, using tonal clashes and intricate hocketing to illuminate their narratives. All of this happens in just a minute or two. Like punk songs, motets are intense and fleeting. What binds these complex miniatures is the theme of devotion, the persistent and undying acts of love found in both amorous and sacred narratives of the Middle Ages.
Listening to Anonymous 4's album "Love's Illusion," a collection of 13th century motets from the Montpellier Codex, I found myself drawn to a particular two-part motet, Ne m'a pas oublié. I admired how the droning tenor line patiently cycled around a single tone, bobbing like a cork in water, and how its repetitive and mirrored phrases created a lulling effect. The top voice threaded through the tenor, smearing against it to create fleeting moments of shimmering harmonic friction, elevating and descending in gentle acrobatics, pulling us into the emotional drama of the text, a story of longing and heartbreak.
I decided to use the motet Ne m'a pas oublié as the source material for Devotions (2022), a commission from the piano trio Longleash. In Devotions, the motet acted as a reservoir from which I extracted little melodic strands, turns of phrases, and harmonic slices, fusing them with my own expressions and sensibilities. The motet and my own music had considerable overlap—lulling, narrowness, smearing, repetitiveness, and serenity. But what was new for me, yet native to the motet, was the assemblage of and engagement with historical musical materials. In medieval motets the bottom voice is borrowed from plainchant and often altered. In Ne m'a pas oublié, for instance, the Easter gradual Haec dies is excerpted into fragmented phrases which are structured anew to form the tenor line. I composed with a similar attitude, excavating and reworking snippets and contours of this motet to make my own music, borrowing with a very light touch, keeping the motet more in my peripheral vision, strewn on the floor, tacked to the wall, than "on the stand" in front of me. In the process, historical meanings and materials become renovated and warped, the voices becomes voiceless. Yet, a sense of singing remains in the phrasing, range, and expression. This sort of "inbetweenness"—here, between instrument and voice—is a hallmark of motets: they flicker between the divine and earthly, the eternal and now, the cantor and troubadour.