Floruit Egregiis
Channel: Douglas Boyce
Date: 2019-04-12

Performed by counter)induction, Miranda Cuckson (violin) and Caleb van der Swaagh (cello) in March 2019.  Dedicated to M. Jennifer Bloxam.

(more notes and comments at www.douglasboyce.net/floruit-egregiis)

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This work is dedicated to M. Jennifer Bloxam, a noted scholar of the Franco-Flemish liturgical music with whom I studied at Williams. While I was studying  with her, Jennifer published her seminal study  “In Praise of Spurious Saints: The Missae Floruit egregiis by Pipelare and La Rue,” an essay from which I borrow liberally in this note and this work.  My piece shares its topoi with her essay, the interelated masses 'Missa de Sancto Livino' of M. Pipelare and 'Missa de Sancto Job' of Pierre de la Rue.  Both composers were active in the Franco-Flemish blossoming of polyphony in the late 15th and early 16th centuries; both masses have material which can be traced back to the antiphon 'Floruit egregiis infans Livinus in actis.'  Scholarship has suggest the Pierre de la Rue took as his model not the original plainsongs of the antiphon, but rather Pipelare's elaborations of those chants.  This complexity bears witness to the continuing cultivation of essentially medieval musical traits in the north during the latter half of the fifteenth century.   Beyond the positive sentiments of the 'excellent flourishing'  (floruit egregiis) of the title and the contrapuntal textures of Pipelare and La Rue, it is the extraordinary density (even by the involuted standards of the period) of the  interlacing of pre-existent texts and tunes within the framework of a polyphonic mass that resonates with me.  The melodic material of the work is derived from three sources.  The first are the aforementioned Masses by Pipelare and La Rue, passages of which are refashioned and embedded within the rather open and free flowing form of the piece.   The second is the plainsong cantus firmus used in those masses, but not one to which we have an historical source, but one which was uncovered (or reverse engineered) by Jennifer in her examination of the 'Floruit egregiis' masses; this continues the tradition of adoption and transformation described by her, but includes her and her scholarship in this chain of adoption.  The third source is Jennifer's name itself;– echoing the 16th technique of soggetto cavato dalle parole,(a subject carved out of the words, I employ a system of transliteration each letter of the alphabet ‘maps’ on to one of the 12 pitches, producing a  chromatic set that functions as a recurrent theme in the work, and situates the work as a memorial to Prof. Bloxam's impact on my understanding of music, music-making, and the historicity of composition.  Studying with her began a continuing transformation of my understanding of composition; this work, with its folding and re-folding of history and language embodies my sense of composition of playing out of tensions, between creation and recapitulation, between old and new, between early and late, between tradition and self, and between autonomy and heritage.