motet for three pairs of voices, part of In memoria - duration: c.6'00 Thou wast present as on this day is a motet for three pairs of voices and was commissioned as part of In memoria – a live electro-acoustic concert programme devised by Antony Pitts and Edward Wickham for The Clerks and subsequently remixed and broadcast twice on BBC Radio 3. The text is for Holy Saturday or Easter Eve and has its origins in the Orthodox liturgy; the music builds directly on two sources: a Messianic theme from the composer’s oratorio Jerusalem-Yerushalayim and Josquin des Prez’s Nymphes des bois. Josquin’s memorial motet is, in turn, the central source for the sound collage which threads through In memoria, evoking a dialogue between our own synthetic age and the deep music of memory represented by the greatest late-mediaeval and early-Renaissance composers. Thou wast present as on this day celebrates and mourns the past, the present, and eternity together: the text is heard three times – in three different places, as it were – and the three pairs of voices weave an increasingly intricate texture around a luminous major triad. This score is available with a unique licence to print unlimited copies for local/personal use (i.e. for your church, your choir, your home, or your educational establishment). study score
.gif){kind=small}
