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In memoria (as heard on BBC Radio 3)

CD.GR/IM
Our Price: £4.94

view all CDs & mp3s, December 2008, May 2009

devised and produced by Edward Wickham & Antony Pitts with new and electro-acoustic music by Antony Pitts - a Golden Radio production for BBC Radio 3

(click to open iTunes)

Edward Wickham,
The Clerks,
Antony Pitts


	"...an intensely moving meditation - in music, sound, words, rhyme and prayer - on the act of memorial. At the centre was a live performance of medieval Josquin's lament for Ockeghem, Nymphes des Bois, recorded in atmospheric venues such as the Crossness Pumping Station... Layered over this, and with the music increasingly discordant, were spoken anecdotes about death, and being the person left behind. The effect, incredibly, was uplifting: an extraordinary mix of the celestial and the prosaic. There wa also catharsis and a sense of new beginnings, through the inclusion of children's voices and snippets of nursery rhymes. 'There was an old woman who swallowed a horse,' they cried gleefully. 'She's dead - of course.'" THE GUARDIAN

"Industrial decay is the backdrop to this gentle ritual dialogue between late-mediaeval memorial motets by Ockeghem, Dufay, and Josquin des Prez, and recent fragments of anecdote, reflection, and reminiscence. Josquin's lament for Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois, is heard through an electronic prism as increasingly distressed audio, and the sequence culminates in a new motet by Antony Pitts, Thou wast present as on this day, celebrating the simultaneous present of eternity. Edward Wickham directs The Clerks in live performances from Crossness Pumping Station, Sellafield Visitors' Centre, and elsewhere..."

Hear an excerpt at: http://www.theclerks.co.uk/mp3/InMemoriaOPENING.mp3

In 2008 The Clerks and director Edward Wickham commissioned composer Antony Pitts to develop a live electro-acoustic concert programme with them based around the repertoire featured in their album In Memoria. Partly inspired by an exploratory visit to the tunnels of the National Mining Museum near Wakefield, and ultimately recorded in non-traditional, multi-layered performance spaces including Crossness Pumping Station in Bexley, In memoria evokes a dialogue between our own synthetic age and the deep music of memory represented by the greatest late-mediaeval and early-Renaissance composers. Ockeghem, Dufay, Obrecht, and Josquin each wrote motets to memorialize themselves and their colleagues: Dufay's motet, designed to be sung at his own death-bed, features a turning-point in Western artistic expression as he invokes a minor modality to implore mercy for himself; Josquin, in his turn, uses the harmonic contradictions between the traditional modes to lament the passing of Ockeghem in his iconic setting of Nymphes des bois. In this specially-mixed collage for radio these loved voices are presented as part of a living concert ritual as well as through an electronic prism; fragments of anecdote, reflection, and reminiscence - drawn from children's songs, poetry, real stories both humorous and tragic - culminate in a new motet by Antony Pitts for three pairs of voices, Thou wast present as on this day – where the past, present, and eternity itself are celebrated and mourned together.

Nearing the end of a disquisition which was to set the tone for public self-examination from the Middle Ages to Oprah, Augustine turns in his Confessions to the subject of memory itself. Having, through recollection of past sins, enacted a form of contrition (as well as some score-settling), he reflects on the symmetrical phenomena of memory and expectation, and by implication also on the nature of existence and eternity. He is to recite a Psalm (presumably one that he has committed to memory). Before he does so, the full extent of the Psalm stretches ahead of him in his expectation; half-way through the recital, the Psalm is divided between those verses still to come, and those which are now in the past. Finally "the whole expectation is exhausted" and all has "passed into memory". He goes on: "this which takes place in the whole Psalm, the same takes place in each several portion of it, and each several syllable; the same holds in that longer action, whereof this Psalm may be part; the same holds in the whole life of man, whereof all the actions of man are parts; the same holds through the whole age of the sons of men, whereof all the lives of men are parts." Humanity is forever balanced between the past and the future. And yet, Augustine reasons, future and past exist only in the mind: as "expectation of things to come" and "memory of things past". All time, he implies, is contained within the present moment; the analogy is with the way in which God may be said to understand time: not as the unfolding of a linear narrative, but as an object eternally present in the mind.

Augustine uses the example of the recitation of a familiar Psalm, but it might instead have been a well-known story, or rhyme, whose ending is known - indeed, is inevitable - as soon as the first words are spoken. There is a form of cruelty which authors inflict on characters who can't escape their own destinies; just as, with the swallowing of a fly, the old woman sets in train a sequence which results in catastrophe, of course. "In memoria aeterna erit iustus: ab auditione mala non timebit." As so often in the Gregorian liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, the meaning and implication of this statement has changed in the process of its translation from the Book of Psalms to the Requiem mass. In Psalm 112, its two clauses appear in two separate, albeit consecutive, verses. "The righteous man will never be moved: he will be remembered for ever. He is not afraid of evil tidings; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord." The suggestion here is that the evil tidings are of a worldly nature: a bereavement or loss of property, perhaps. But through the elision of the verses - "The righteous man will be remembered for ever: he is not afraid of evil tidings" - we are transported into the theology of the after-life, and of judgement. "Mala" in this sense refer to the rulings of the Eternal Judge on the Last Day; and in this context, "memoria" is perhaps no longer passive - it entails acts of commemoration...

Thou wast present as on this day sets a text for Holy Saturday or Easter Eve – its origins in the Orthodox liturgy – and builds directly on two musical sources: Josquin's Nymphes des bois (the central musical material for In memoria) and a central theme from Pitts's own oratorio Jerusalem-Yerushalayim. The text is heard three times - in three different places, as it were - and The Clerks' three pairs of voices weave an increasingly intricate texture around a luminous major triad.

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