vray dieu d’amours / vray dieu d’amours [2014]

for horn

duration :: 6’

Commissioned by Samuel Stoll

First performance :: Samuel Stoll — Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig, 15 December 2015

Vray dieu d’amours is a simple, lovely, essentially homophonic chanson in four voices by the Flemish composer Matthaeus Pipelare (c. 1450-1515), which was popular enough to be quickly recast around 1500 by Jean Japart as a macaronic contrafactum in the form of a litany: Vray dieu d’amours / Sancte Johannes baptista / Ora pro nobis.  This piece is a modest collection of shadows left by both of these works laid atop one another, collecting scraps in the form of a hermetic, private practice, to which the instrument is a more or less awkward, more or less insistent mediator, which misses entirely some things that transpire and throws perhaps too much weight behind others.  We only see what comes through.