Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco

Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) for eight-track tape is a musical composition by Jonathan Harvey commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The two sounds contrasted are the voice of the composers' son, and the bell at Winchester Cathedral, England; and the text is taken from that written on the bell: "Horas Avolantes Numero, Mortuos Plango: Vivos ad Preces Vovo (I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead: the living I call to prayer)."[1] Music V was used to analyze and transform the sounds.

The music is 'octophonic', being projected into the auditorium through a cube of eight speakers: "the ideal listener is 'inside' the bell, its partials distributed in space; the boy's voice flies around, derived from, yet becoming the bell sound."[2]

The organization of the piece may, "be interpreted in a number of ways:"[3]

  1. "as a quasi-tonal procedure"
  2. "as an attempt to transfer serial processes to electronic music"
  3. "as a 'prolongation' of the initial inharmonic series"
  4. "'as different perspectives on an object that is always present'" per Michael Clarke

According to Curtis Roads, "Three compositions produced in the 1980s stand as good examples of compositional manipulation of analysis data: Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1981) by Jonathan Harvey, Désintegrations (1983, Salabert Trajectoires) by Tristan Murail, and Digital Moonscapes (1985, CBS/Sony) by Wendy Carlos."[4]

Sources

  1. ^ Roads, Curtis, ed. (1992). Harvey Jonathan. "Moruos Plango, Vivos Voco: A Realization at IRCAM", The Music Machine, p.91. ISBN 9780262680783.
  2. ^ Emmerson, Simon (2007). Living Electronic Music, p.157. ISBN 9780754655480.
  3. ^ Downes, Michael (2009). Jonathan Harvey: Song offerings and White as jasmine, p.22. ISBN 9780754660224.
  4. ^ Roads, Curtis (1996). The Computer Music Tutorial, p.146. ISBN 9780262680820.

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