Program Notes: 14 February

14 February 2025

Kate Moore and Herz Ensemble

Valentine’s Day Special

Vocalists:

Jennifer van de Hart
Rianne Wilbers
Michaela Riener
Marjolein Stots
Els Mondelaers
Kaspar Kröner
Georgi Sztojanov
Daan Verlaan
Arnout Lems
Andreas Goetzee

Organists

Geerten van de Wetering
Matthias Havinga

Intrumentalists

Tom Sanderman
Annette Schenk
Beate Loonstra
Meiyi Lee
Elisabeth Smalt
Jellantsje de Vries

Choirs

Focus Vocaal
VU Kamer Koor
Herz Singers

Program

Part 1:

Uisce – Herz Singers
Eclipsed Vision – Focus vocaal, VU kamerkoor & Herz Singers
Spel I – Meiyi Lee
Psalm III – Herz Singers
La Folia – Matthias Havinga
La Grazia – Matthias Havinga + Herz Singers
Stabat Mater – Focus Vocaal + Meiyi Lee + Matthias Havinga

Pauze

Part 2:

Miserere – Jellantsje de Vries, Elisabeth Smalt, Geerten van de Wetering
Deus meus et omnia – Kaspar Kröner, Tom Sanderman, Beate Loonstra, Geerten van de Wetering
Cantico del Sole – Kaspar Kröner, Tom Sanderman, Beate Loonstra, Geerten van de Wetering

…

Telephone – Tom Sanderman, Annette Schenk
Monologues and Dialogues 1 – Geerten van de Wetering
Monologues and Dialogues 2 – Tom Sanderman, Annette Schenk, Jellantsje de Vries, Elisabeth Smalt, Meiyi Lee, Beate Loonstra, Geerten van de Wetering

Uisce (2007)

“Uisce”, meaning “water” in Irish, is an installation for voices, where the voices tumble over each other like water falling. The performers read the score in a unique way so that each performer forges an individual pathway through the piece like a current of water in a river. The original score is a visual artwork set out on five ceiling to floor panels representing a waterfall.

This piece, written at the Inishlacken artist in residence in Ireland curated by Rosie McGurran, was premiered by The Song Company in 2007 during the Modart07 composers meeting in Sydney directed by Roland Peelman.

ECLIPSED VISION, A NEVERENDING SONG (2006)

Eclipsed Vision – a never-ending song for everyone, by composer Kate Moore, is a fascinating living sound sculpture where silhouettes of people in slow procession, pitted against the twilight mid-summer sky, emit evolving harmonies in gradual transformation. The result is an otherworldy experience where performers and audience alike are drawn in to the act of music making, engaging with the sacred harmony of the beautiful natural surroundings of the festival and the intangibility of the ineffable evening sky.

Participants from every walk of life, male and female are given a note to sing in procession around a site-specific location within which the audience listens to the slow progression of evolving harmonies. The notes are set out on a sequence of individual cards. Every card contains a specific musical tone. As a singer takes a card, they sing this tone as they follow the previous singer, creating a moving line of vocalists. The harmony gradually changes as people exit and re-enter with new tones. The progression of people alludes to the trajectory of planets around the sun or cells of blood around the body.

The harmony gradually changes as people exit and re-enter with new tones. The progression of people alludes to the trajectory of planets around the sun or cells of blood around the body. Each page of the score is set out on a sequence of individual cards kept in a box. Each card contains a specific musical tone. As each singer takes a card they sing this tone as they walk around the perimeter of the performance space.

Spel I from Coral Speak (August 2016)

Spel I from Coral Speak, written for Louise Devenish, is a solo piece for vibraphone that is part of a percussion suite of laments and playful dances in homage to the fragility of the Great Barrier Reef, where the corals are currently under threat due to climate changes and human intervention. Each piece imagines the colourful interplay of movement between the living corals, joyful sentient creatures celebrating their idyllic surrounding and utopian waters. The pieces have a melancholic edge at the prospect of the corals retreating and dissipating as the water changes. The ebullient dance of life and beauty comes to an abrupt halt as it is silenced and abandoned, leaving behind a skeleton like a ruined underwater city that once thrived, never to return.

PSALM 3 (2019)

This Psalm is a psalm that evokes the protection of God against the enemy. It is a statement that all people are God’s people and all life is sustained by God, for those who reach out for salvation. No person, neither enemy, national group or country has the power to declare whether another person, nation or country is worthy of the protection of God. In the light of God who is all powerful, all seeing, all protecting and all loving, all people, nations and countries are worthy of salvation.

In setting the psalm, I found the music within the text, where the cantillation of the melody, sprang from the emotionality and deep resonance of the Psalm. Based upon the key of C minor, a dark key associated with suffering, the voices in canon grow from a solo mezzo voice, like branches of a tree riddled with knots. Distant portamenti between the voices, moving at different speeds, allude to the sirens of far-away emergency vehicles.

Psalm 3 is a harrowing and evocative plea from a place of despair where a broken leader prays for protection against his enemies. He knows that justice will be brought upon those named, whose evil ways cloud their higher judgement, because The Lord, creator, and protector of all can see all and will expose it. By calling out to The Lord, he upholds the faith that justice will be done, retribution against his enemies will be achieved and balance will once again be restored. In this, the divine king finds solace and comfort, finding peace within the storm.

Miserere (2019)

Miserere is a mysterious 51 note melody, written for violinist Joe Puglia for the Space Junk project that was premiered in 2019 by ASKO Schoenberg Ensemble for the Minimal Music Festival in the Muziekgebouw and arranged for Herz Ensemble. It is a reference to Psalm 51 which evokes a deep sense of emotional rapture, repentance and self-reproach. It is a confessional psalm that invokes the cleansing of one’s transgressional actions in mind, body and spirit and is like a ritual bath for purification. The music reflects this in that it is designed upon four equal phrases, each one inspired by the four cosmic elements: firmament, wind, fire and water, and the four humoristic temperaments: Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Melancholic, which turn in one direction, in the right order, to form a turning wheel, forming an hypnotic mantra for healing through remedy, the rebalancing of the humours to return to perfect equilibrium and become again in peace.

CANTICO DEL SOLE (2021) – TEXT BY SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

Canticle of Creatures “Cantico del Sole” – Kate Moore

I came to know the Canticle of Creatures “Cantico del Sole” in December 2017. The song was written by Saint Francis of Assisi not long before he passed away in 1226. I had traveled to Assisi with a friend on a pilgrimage for Christmas. We had been invited on a personal tour of San Damiano, a sacred place that was rebuilt with loving care by Saint Francis for Saint Clare and her sisterhood of holy blessed virgins. On this tour we visited the cell where she lived, the chapel and the courtyard where her well can be found. Once the tour was complete, we were given a copy of the Canticle as a gift by the friars who had guided us.

The Canticle of Creatures is an anthem to the essential and elemental cosmology of the trinitarian bond between Creator, Creation and Created in love, wholeness and perfect balance. It is an incantation of divine love evoking the holistic restoration and remedy of the body and spirit through the sustenance provided by the Sun and the nourishment provided by Earth, where the experience of corporality and spirituality is connected to the interplay between the temperaments and heavenly bodies. The temperaments are polarized in relation to either the Sun or Earth, tangible or intangible, hot, dry, cold and moist in triadic constellations of equal opposites. The moon and stars act as a guide to water through the tides, channels and currents on earth, cool and moist. The wind feeds fire, the intangible essence of the sun, hot and dry. They flow harmoniously and in order, whereas by disturbing the order, water extinguishes the warmth of the fire and the wind, through weather obscures the beauty of the moon and stars which is therefore discordant. This corresponds to the interplay between corporality: the interrelationship between disease and peace, which are equal opposites and spirituality: the interrelationship between the damned and the blessed where the diseased are obscured, the damned are extinguished, the blessed are given guidance and the peaceful are nourished. The canticle could be considered to be a poetic depiction of a medicinal chart encoded with valuable and insightful motions to balance the humors of the body and the soul, as well as nations, natural ecosystems and environments and therefore to heal in the oneness of an all loving, all embracing Trinitarian God.

Most interesting is the structure of the canticle, perfectly and symmetrically ordered in triads of equal opposites, Sun/ wind/ fire and Earth/ moon and stars/ water that mirror the predicament of the creatures, corporality/ disease/ peace and spirituality/ the damned/ the blessed, creating four triads that correspond beautifully to the twelve notes of a musical scale and the triads that can be formed within the scale. In that way the musicality of the canticle can symbolically carry the cosmology of its message.

In 2021 I was commissioned by the community of Sant Egidio in Amsterdam to write a new work to celebrate the jubilee year of the organ in the Mozes en Aaronkerk on Waterlooplein. The concert and celebration were planned for October and because the date of the concert was close to the feast of Saint Francis I was inspired to set the Canticle of Creatures for this event. I chose to set the canticle to an ensemble featuring organ, harp, saxophone and counter tenor, to represent the four temperaments and the four angelic heralds, the eagle, ox, lion and man. It was written for Herz Ensemble.

Telephone (2014)

Telephone was written as a birthday gift for Louis Andriessen for his 75 birthday concert and feast. The premiere was in het Muziekgebouw and was performed by two trumpets across the balconies of the foyer of the concert hall. Subsequently I made an arrangement of the piece for Leine Roebana that was included in the dance cycle Herz. Now the piece is included in the regular repertoire of Herz Ensemble. The name Telephone came from my memory of the first conversation I had with Louis in a public telephone booth next to the youth hostel in The Hague. The piece is based on the notion of a hocket. An ancient compositional device wherein the notes of a melody are exchanged between the instruments. This was embraced by Louis in his seminal work Hoketus.

Kate Moore Music