Sounding Memory seeks the sonic traces of lost voices.

Developed between 2021 and 2023 in collaboration with The New Consort, this program of rarely heard Franco-Flemish polyphony and a new commission has been heard on the GEMS Midtown Concert series and at Saint Thomas Church of Fifth Avenue.

By its sheer emotional force, grief pushed against the guide rails of a well-ordered musical system of notation and counterpoint. In these works, the fabric of pitch-space comes undone, voices reach uncomfortable depths, bells toll in the choir texture, and familiar hollow noteheads turn solid black. Allegory and liturgy commingle, and a pageantry of intricate compositional virtuosity—canons and riddles—is offset by lucid, devastating calls to the deceased.

The program includes a juxtaposition of the voice of King David in Absalon, fili mi (attributed variously to Josquin des Prez or Pierre de La Rue) and Pierre Moulu’s Fiere attropos/Anxiatus est, whose Psalm-derived cantus firmus transmits the embedded, private voice of the French king Louis XII, speaking as David, as he processes the loss of his wife Anne of Brittany in 1514.

Working closely from features of this repertory, I contributed a newly commissioned work on texts by Josquin des Prez’s colleagues, Fais doncq un chant/Requiem, to mark Josquin@500 (d. 1521).

“Put him under water. Still, he fears not the deep.”
Serafino dall'Aquila, Ad Jusquino suo compagno musico d' Ascanio