Pange Lingua

(1998-1999)
For 2 Sopranos, Piano,
2 Marimbas & String Trio

Duration: ca. 15½ minutes

First performance:
March 29, 1999
at Northern Illinois University by:

Valerie Gordon - Soprano
Johanna McKenzie Miller - Soprano
Nathan Birkholz - Piano
Nick Auriemmo - Marimba
Pete Ellingson - Marimba
Cordula Merks - Violin
Evrim Bastas - Viola
Andrea Ware - Violoncello
Susan L. Tarson - Conductor

Second performance:
November 3, 1999
at Northern Illinois University by the

Valerie Gordon - Soprano
Johanna McKenzie Miller - Soprano
Nathan Birkholz - Piano
Nick Auriemmo - Marimba
Aaron Puckett - Marimba
Monica Boboc - Violin
Evrim Bastas - Viola
Jeff McAuley - Violoncello
Amy Crabtree - Conductor

Program Notes

The influence behind what eventually became this piece is rooted in my interest in both early as well as contemporary music. My original conception was to use the old ecclesiastical modes, instead of major or minor scales, and employ the process of centonization, a practice used in the Middle Ages in which composers wrote their melodies by combining a series of notes taken from a "catalog" of pitch patterns. Many of the Gregorian chants were composed this way. I therefore wanted to find such a resource that contained these melodic gestures and centonize new melodies but treat them in a more contemporary manner, specifically by weaving a contrapuntal minimalist web of "medieval" sounding lines. Upon further investigation, I found that everyone agreed that this process of centonization was used, but no one knew anything about the original source from which the patterns were taken. It was then time for plan B so I decided to approach this idea from a different angle by looking at the extant literature, Gregorian chant. This way I could take a melody and break it down into fragments and then "re-centonize" new melodies from them. I chose to work with the plainchant Pange Lingua (pg. 957 of the Liber usualis – also appears on the cover of this score), which translated from the first line "Pange Lingua Gloriosi," means "Sing Tongue of the Glory." I decided to use this chant because I really love the way the Renaissance composer Josquin Des Prez based his Missa Pange Lingua from the same melody and it was in the phrygian mode, one of my favorite of the ecclesiastical scales. One of Josquin’s melodies is actually quoted in this work several times. This opening tenor motive from the "Kyrie," which appears throughout Josquin’s mass, is printed below.

While Pange Lingua is influenced by Medieval and Renaissance music, it also deals with my fascination with two of my favorite living composers, Steve Reich, the American minimalist and Arvo Pärt, the Estonian neo-medieval composer (two musicians who are greatly influenced by early music). To a lesser extent other influences came from Meredith Monk, particularly in the vocal duet towards the end of the work, and another Estonian composer named Erkki-Sven Tüür who adeptly combines many different contemporary compositional styles together, such as minimalism, sound mass and serialism, with early music ideas.

Pange Lingua lasts approximately 15 minutes and ranges from minimalist textures to ethereal sections in which time seems suspended. Many early music techniques are employed in the composition such as isorhythmic canon, mensuration canon, melodic retrograde and inversion, and of course, paraphrase of the plainchant. Although there are voices, there is no text as the singers vocalize. There are many meter shifts throughout the piece, especially toward the climax where the time signature changes in just about every measure.

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Copyright © 1999 by Kurt Mortensen