Vidi aquam : 10' duration score for 40-part chorus a cappella, complete with recording
- Submitting institution
-
University of St Andrews
- Unit of assessment
- 31 - Theology and Religious Studies
- Output identifier
- 271522282
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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C - Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- For forty-part chorus (eight five-voiced choirs) a cappella, Vidi aquam was composed as a companion piece for Thomas Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in alium (c. 1570). The text of Spem in alium is a short response in the Sarum Rite (at Matins). The composer drew on personal liturgical experiences for a similarly succinct and affecting text: the Easter antiphon ‘Vidi aquam’, which accompanies the sprinkling of baptismal water. Approaching the technical challenge of weaving such complex multi-voice polyphony, they researched the counterpoint styles of Tallis and Byrd from the sixteenth century. Using Tallis’s Spem as an initial template, Vidi aquam follows the underlying ‘harmonic’ or choral tread, which activates the forty original parts. Like Tallis, the composer uses the full forty voices sparingly, to emphasise certain high points in the text, like the ecstatic ‘alleluias’ or at the words ‘et omnes’. In this composition, they moved beyond this model, the music becoming more impressionistic, where the plethora of voices create a floating, smudging sound– almost as if the music has gone to sleep and is in a dream. The composer adopted a painterly approach with all the voices, trying to use them like an orchestra to build rich and ethereal colours. In order to achieve the hovering style of ‘singing alongside’, the setting makes use of modern compositional techniques which involve a polytonal mixing of adjacent chords, highlighting the delayed echo effects that choirs can create in large, resonant buildings. Vidi aquam is at once an original composition and a form of ‘meta-music’, in that it offers a sustained performative reflection on a Renaissance choral masterpiece, casting new light on Tallis’s work and initiating a musical and theological dialogue between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries. The world premiere was at St. Rombout's Cathedral, Mechelen, Belgium performed by Vlaams Radiokoor.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
