missa iubilaea
forbidden party
missa iubilaea Mass for the jubilee of the French churches in Rome
shalom for six voices and 20 musicians (2024 - 25)
Through unexpected encounters and coincidences, situations favourable to creativity can arise. When Brother Renaud Escande, director of the Pious Establishments of France in Rome and Loreto, whom I met while I was a resident at the Villa Medici, told me of his wish to commission a mass for the 2025 Jubilee, I confess that I was at first surprised.
The setting of the Mass to music is inseparable from the history of Western music. It was in this context that musical notation was invented and developed. We composers are its direct descendants: from Ockeghem, Josquin Desprez, Machaut, Palestrina and Bach to Beethoven, this form has been a common means of subsistence for many composers. And although the practice became less common in the 20th century, some remarkable examples emerged, such as Ligeti's Requiem.
In Rome, one might think that asking a contemporary composer to compose such a work for the jubilee would be natural for the Church; in reality, more than a century has passed without this kind of commission.
After listening to a few recordings together and discussing them, we agreed: obviously, I would follow the texts of the Roman Missal, but aesthetically, I would continue my musical research with all the freedom and dedication I owe to my art and my friends.
Kyrie, Gloria, Alleluia, Sanctus and Agnus Dei.
I first wanted to dive into the texts that constitute the Roman Missal. The poets who composed these texts developed forms, structures, symbolism and ambiguities that served as the starting point for my structural reflections.
The mass is in five parts, a missa brevis, a classic form of musical liturgy, in which the sung parts, mostly a capella, are interspersed with long instrumental sections.
The vocal music that inhabits me is of all kinds: from Corsican, Georgian, Albanian and Pygmy vocal polyphonies to the monodic, yet transformed, voices of rappers and numerous pop music styles. And although very different at first glance, they all share a common quality of a very particular attention to timbre. It always seems blurred or ambiguous: the fusion of voices to bring out a fifth harmonic voice in Sardinian singing, the use of yodelling in Pygmy polyphonies, or the use of a vocoder to enrich the timbre and change its colour.
In this mass, two vocal trios are the main focus. But each trio is treated as a single entity, where the individuals who compose them rarely sing alone. The voices, separated only by a perfect fifth, upper and lower, merge in strict homorhythmic parallelism, creating the timbre-harmonies that are at the heart of my latest research.
In general, the work focuses on the one hand on rhythm and its micro-variations, alternating loops, stops and shifts, and on the other hand on the chords emerging from these superimposed fifths.
Writing.
In my research and my immersion in medieval masses, I listened extensively to the unique interpretations of the Organum ensemble, which combines medieval singers with traditional singers from Corsica and elsewhere. So it was quite natural that I asked its founder, Marcel Pérès, to join the project. Preferring to work from my graphic and quasi-neumatic drafts rather than the version written in modern notation, we were able to think together about a musical notation that would combine oral tradition and writing. Although melody is not absent from this new composition, which follows the contours of a microtonal modality, my work focuses above all on rhythm and its micro-variations, alternating loops, stops and delays.
The instrumentation consists of 20 musicians. Bringing together members of my group s·a·m·p·l·e, the Roman percussion group Ars Ludi, and the organist of Saint-Louis des Français, it combines wind instruments (3 flutes, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and 1 bass trombone), percussion, plucked strings (2 harps, 1 harpsichord), organ and finally three double basses. With the exception of the latter, the instrumentation is taken directly from the instruments mentioned in the Apocalypse of Saint John, all in trios in reference to the number 3, which is so important in Christianity. But also because, in situ, the orchestration follows the acoustic model of organ stops, with the use of the same instruments duplicated to create configurations on the borderline between complex noise and harmony.
Thus, this Missa iubilaea was intended to be ambitious, worthy of a jubilee year, supported by France and truly inscribed in the city of Rome. Written in a Europe and Middle East at war, between Paris, Rome and the limitless windows of space and time on our screens, it is subtitled shalom in reference to that delicate moment when Christ's message seemed to be embodied live on television in the person of an old woman offering a handshake and a word, ‘shalom’, to one of her captors, who himself seems taken aback despite his balaclava and Kalashnikov. The woman responds to horror not with horror, but with respect and consideration, ‘shalom’, meaning both peace and salvation, as the only salvation in the face of violence, like the one who asked his Father in excelcis to forgive them because ‘they know not what they do’ (Luke 23).
I dedicate it to Renaud Escande, o.p.
duration ~60’
commissioned by the Pieux établissement
de la France à Rome et à Lorette
for the church Saint Louis des Français
originally scheduled for 15 and 16 May 2025, the death of Pope Francis in April of the same year forced the concerts to be postponed.
distribution
ensemble organum
s·a·m·pl·e
ars ludi