Floruit Egregiis

In the spring of 2011, I was recovering from a serious medical issue and, in addition to the support of family and colleagues, that rather dark time was lightened by two happy occurrences. The first was connecting with Elise Pittenger, one of the artists premiering the work tonight. Her enthusiasm for my work, transmitted electronically in properly 21st century manner from Belo Horizonte to Washington, D.C. Her interest in having me compose her a new work was tremendously heartening; this is the first work that I have written since recovering, and doing so with such a supportive and interested collaborator has been a wonderful resource as I have recovered my strength and capacities. The second occurrence was an invitation from by Professor Jennifer Bloxam to present a paper outlining the relationship between my music and so-called Early music (a shorthand for music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods) at my alma mater, Williams College. It was in the preparation of that essay that the notion of this piece came into clarity.

While I was studying at Williams (and with her), Jennifer published her seminal study “In Praise of Spurious Saints: The Missae Floruit egregiis by Pipelare and La Rue,” an essay from which I borrow liberally in this note and this work. My piece takes as its ‘topics’ the related ‘Missa de Sancto Livino’ of M. Pipelare and ‘Missa de Sancto Job’ of Pierre de la Rue. Both composers were active in the Franco-Flemish blossoming of polyphony in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Both masses have material which can be traced back to the antiphon ‘Floruit egregiis infans Livinus in actis;’ scholarship has suggest the Pierre de la Rue took as his model not the original plainsongs of the antiphon, but rather Pipelare’s elaborations of those chants. This complexity bears witness to the continuing cultivation of essentially medieval musical traits in the north during the latter half of the fifteenth century. Beyond the positive sentiments of the ‘excellent flourishing’ (floruit egregiis) of the title and the contrapuntal textures of Pipelare and La Rue, it is the extraordinary density (even by the involuted standards of the period) of the interlacing of pre-existent texts and tunes within the framework of a polyphonic mass that resonates with me.

The melodic material of the work is derived from three sources. The first are the aforementioned Masses by Pipelare and La Rue, passages of which are refashioned and embedded within the rather open and free flowing form of the piece. The second is the plainsong cantus firmus used in those masses, but not one to which we have an historical source, but one which was uncovered (or reverse engineered) by Jennifer in her examination of the ‘Floruit egregiis’ masses; this continues the tradition of adoption and transformation described by her, but includes her and her scholarship in this chain of adoption. The third source is Jennifer’s name itself;– echoing the 16th technique of ‘soggetto cavato dalle parole’ (a subject carved out of the words), I employ a system of transliteration each letter of the alphabet ‘maps’ on to one of the 12 pitches, producing a chromatic set that functions as a recurrent theme in the work, and situates the work as a memorial to Prof. Bloxam’s impact on my understanding of music, music-making, and the historicity of composition. Studying with her began a continuing transformation of my understanding of composition; this work, with its folding and re-folding of history and language, embodies my sense of composition of playing out of tensions, between creation and recapitulation, between old and new, between early and late, between tradition and self, and between autonomy and heritage.

This recording is of the premiere performance of the work, on 6 Nov 2011, at the Manhas Musicais at the town, Fundação de Educação Artistica in Belo Horizonte, Brazil by Elise Pittenger (cello) and Rommel Fernandes (violin).