Audio Sample
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Performance by Sydney Chamber Choir, Nicholas Routley from the CD De profundis |
Score
De profundis : motet for 8-part choir a capella / by Nicholas Routley.
Library shelf no. 782.55526/ROU 1 [Available for loan]
Work Overview
This motet is an arrangement of a fragment from an opera that has
yet to be completed, my version of the Indian epic,
Mahabharata. The themes of the motet are the love of
lost
homelands by refugees from war, and the love of humanity embodied
in the compassionate act of artistic composition. It is in two
sections, each of which finishes
with the same music.
The epic culminates in a disastrous war, and this motet is sung
by refugees from both sides of that conflict. They long for a
homeland that is now barred to them, they long for their
unrecoverable past, their lost paradise; but with every memory
the the horrors of the war interpose themselves obsessively. They
try to forget, but at the same time they fear forgetting, so on
their journeys they become storytellers, and come to realise
that, while they formerly pursued various occupations, they are
now constituted largely by their stories. Just as they need
hospitality in terms of food and lodging, their stories need the
hospitality that only a writer, a composer can afford - their
stories must be written down,
sung, in order to become part of culture; which is to say, in
order to save the world from endless cycles of war and
destruction. This is the functions of epics like the Iliad, or
the
Ring Cycle.
So here the refugees ask Vyasa, the author of the Indian epic (in
the sense that Homer is the author of the Iliad) to "take up", to
write, their stories. They do this in a slow fugue,
towards the end of the second part of the motet. In the course of
this fugue arise references to music across the entire range of
the history of Western tonal music, from
Monteverdi through Bach and Beethoven to Wolf, Mahler, and many
others. It recalls the suspensions of Monteverdi, the sequences
of Bach, the tortured counterpoint of the
Beethoven of the late quartets. This is an image for the complex
web of shared and unshared experience which the refugees have of
an immensely rich but lost history (and it
is no accident that the ideas of "fugue" and "refugee" are so
similar).
The two sections of this motet, De Profundis and SuperFlumina,
may be performed separately.
Work Details
Year: 2004
Instrumentation: SSAATTBB choir.
Duration: 26 min.
Difficulty: Advanced
Contents note: De profundis (12 min.)-- Super flumina Babylonis (14 min.)
Dedication note: Dedicated to Arundhati Roy
First performance: by Sydney Chamber Choir, Nicholas Routley — 18 Sep 04. St James Church, Sydney
Text by Nicholas Routley, after the Vulgate and Hélène Cixous
Subjects
- In the form/style of: Motets
Performances of this work
Sep 04: Performed during tour to Bathurst, Orange, Canberra. Featuring Sydney Chamber Choir, Nicholas Routley.
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