palestrina meets harvey
On Friday 31 March, we return to London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields to present our choral-electronic programme and the London premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s mesmerising arrangement of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater for choir and surround sound electronics.
This blog post takes you through the programme which features music by Josquin des Prez, Rhiannon Randle, our collaborator for this project Joe Bates, and of course Palestrina and Harvey.
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) is a seminal work of electronic music, composed by Harvey in his first year at IRCAM, the flagship French electronic music studio. The work displays Harvey’s curious mix of influences: the rigour and strangeness of French serialism, the sonorities of the English cathedral tradition and his idiosyncratic spiritualism.
The piece takes two samples: the great tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral, and the voice of Harvey’s son, Dominic, who was a chorister at Winchester at the time. The bells give the piece its name: inscribed on them is the text ‘Horas avolantes numero, mortuous plango, vivos ad preces voco.’ (I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer.)
As listeners, the multi-channel speaker system places us inside the bell. The piece transforms its complex tones, modulating in gliding swoops between its layered pitches. Harvey describes himself turning the bell ‘inside out’, making its low notes decay quickly and its high notes linger on. Dominic’s singing is warped too, its consonants and vowels split and manipulated. These effects were at the cutting edge of computer music: a persistent feature of Harvey’s work is the combination of new technology with ancient sources.
This is followed by Josquin des Prez’s stunning motet Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria à5, introducing the Marian theme that runs through the rest of the programme. The chant melody is presented in canon between the tenor and alto parts with the other voices surrounding these lines in imitative free polyphony. The music ebbs and flows, moving seamlessly between passages of lilting motion and moments of pure stasis such as the tricolon ‘O benigna! O Regina! O Maria!’.
Written for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge in 2011, The Annunciation is one of Harvey’s last works. Most notable in the context of this programme is the opening phrase of the piece which directly quotes Palestrina’s Stabat Mater. This, along with Harvey’s own arrangement of the Palestrina, show how important this 16th century masterpiece was to him, not only when transposing it into new worlds via electronics, but also in an a cappella setting. The reference to the Stabat Mater is particularly striking given the context in Edwin Muir’s annunciation scene: the innocence of ‘the girl’ is shrouded by Harvey’s musical allusion to Mary’s grief following the crucifixion.
As with The Annunciation, Palestrina’s Stabat Mater was written towards the end of his life around 1589/90. Continuing the syllabic style established in the Missa Papae Marcelli, the antiphonal writing for the two choirs points to Venice and shows Palestrina’s awareness of the fashionable polychoral writing of the time. It is easy to see why Harvey was so moved by this piece, with its impassioned setting of one of the most human of sacred texts.
Joe Bates’ Ceasing was commissioned by SANSARA for the 2019 Sound Unbound festival presented by the Barbican and first performed at St Bartholomew the Great in May 2019. Ceasing considers how we deal with death. It was inspired, in part, by the text of the Stabat Mater and by the writing of Derek Parfit. Parfit emphasises how death is more continuous with life than we may imagine, considering how our memory lives on in the minds of others.
Joe describes his process further:
“To write this piece, I interviewed the singers of SANSARA about their experiences of death. This was a strange and moving process; I’m immensely grateful to the singers for their openness. Their stories have been integrated into the text of the piece, which I have written myself.
The piece starts with specificities of my grandmother's death: I rushed to reach the hospital in a taxi but arrived moments after she died. I consider what I missed: how do lives typically end? The piece then opens out further, integrating the individual stories of the singers, first in a huge texture, then as recorded telephone calls, filtered through electronic static. The electronics blur and magnify the choir, suggesting the mass of similar stories behind them, while the structure of the piece – from coherent counterpoint to blurred fade out – evokes a fading consciousness.”
Punctuating the two large scale choral-electronic pieces in the programme is a contemporary setting of O nata lux by Rhiannon Randle who employs dissonance in striking ways throughout the piece, echoing the false relations in Thomas Tallis’ well-known setting of the same text.
Written some two decades after Mortuos, Harvey’s arrangement of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater (2004), in collaboration with the programmer and composer Gilbert Nuono, explores similar piece to the earlier electronic work. The arrangement combines three versions of the Stabat Mater: one sung live by the choir, one processed live from the microphones, and one pre-recorded by another choir and transposed.
These layers create a kaleidoscopic re-working of Palestrina’s work, as the transposed pre-recordings push the tonality into strange new areas. Yet these new key centres always carefully relate to the original, resulting in surprisingly smooth modulations. The live processing of the vocals varies from atmospheric to apocalyptic, recalling at moments an over-saturated echo and at others a whirling cacophony.
For many years, this piece was not able to be performed due to the obsolescence of its digital components: it was composed using Apple’s PowerPC architecture, which has not been supported since 2011. Nuono painstakingly restored the programme in 2022, with the support of Lammermuir Festival and Faber Music, to whom we are hugely grateful. In September 2022, we gave the piece’s UK premiere at the Lammermuir Festival and we’re thrilled to be giving the London premiere at St Martin’s on Friday 31 March.
- Tom Herring & Joe Bates
