o beata infantia – for six voices
I decided to mix rhythmic and free passages for this one. I started by writing the second voice that accompanies the chant, picking out important words from the text to form a calm, sustained line and adding a third voice that sings the same words as the second voice, but as a kind of drone.
I then created the opening section by introducing some rhythm into the chant’s accompanying melody, and turning it into what is essentially a five-voice canon, with the sixth voice a rhythmic drone. However, the canon is sung only once before the chant comes in, which means that only the first voice gets to sing all six phrases; each subsequent voice has one phrase fewer. Also, only the melody is in canon – the voices all sing the same words at the same time.
This revisiting has been great fun to do, though I must admit it turned out not at all as expected (my original plan was to write a sort of lullaby).
I’ve begun to transcribe it. Here’s the first page:
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