Five

In Fall 1999, I had an epiphanic experience listening to the “Pleni sunt” of Ockeghem’s Prolation Mass (a canon at the seventh), after which I began to dismantle everything I had assumed about writing counterpoint. After years of trying to unpack a cryptic statement Schoenberg makes in his writings about the polyphony of the Franco-Flemish School, it all came together in one perceptual moment. I also became certain, as I had begun to in my own contrapuntal writing, that there was an additional quantity in great polyphonic vocal music that classical theory could not account for. I knew now how I could obtain this quantity by ear. I was a graduate student at Columbia and had just become director of the Collegium Musicum. Among the many compositional experiments I was doing at the time, “Five,” a set of 4-part polyphonic speech motets on texts by e.e. cummings, captures a manner of assembling lines contrapuntally unique to the Franco-Flemish School and later only to J.S. Bach. This is the first of the motets I composed in the set.

Please visit my Bandcamp page for the entire set.