the Agnus Dei from a parody-technique Latin mass by Antony Pitts on Henry Purcell's 'Hear my prayer' - duration: c.4'30
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Rather like a fractal diagram each part of this Mass setting magnifies a smaller and smaller section of the original than the one before: decoration assumes structural importance and then - just when all seems to be utterly and fantastically different - the familiar shape of the original re-emerges.
The Agnus Dei returns to C minor: the first section (like the Kyrie) just uses the first phrase as it appears in the original piece (i.e., like a manuscript that is full of holes) but with increasing numbers of extra imitative parts; the second section (as in the Gloria) uses instead the second phrase - which begins to sound very familiar - and also combines the same phrase in augmentation, passing through the voices one by one. From the end of the second section the music is purely Purcell until the final pages of the third section where various spurious emendations lead to the highly-extended final two bars: an enormous English cadence which resolves onto a canon at different speeds representing the eternal peace offered us by the Lamb of God.
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