James Burton: O iter fortissimum

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I was invited by Edmund's Trust to create a new piece in 2024 for use in an ecclesiastical setting, to join a growing portfolio of pieces composed in memory of Edmund Bridges. Earlier in the year I had attended a service at New College Oxford, and the Dean read as a prayer a translation of Hildegard's Sequence for the Holy Spirit, and I knew immediately that these inspiring words would be a good starting point for the new piece. I'm grateful to Dr Venetia Bridges for supplying the translation which appears at the front of the score, and also for her encouragement in choosing this text, not least sharing that her brother Edmund would have approved of the choice. We also discussed his work as a teacher, and how the text would have resonated with him, and thus in the third section of the piece one of the two choirs acts as the 'teacher', and the other follows as a nervous student a bar behind, but growing in confidence as it explores and expands upon the ideas set out by the teacher. The music was created for a choir like that at New College Oxford in mind, and I had also been redigesting William Harris's New College piece Faire is the Heaven, a piece which I've known since I was young. There are passing similarities: there are two SATB choirs used antiphonally, a home key of D flat major and some enharmonic shifts at structural moments. I studied Hildegard's original sequence for these beautiful words, and two gestures from that made their way in to the new music: Hildegard's first interval is a rising fifth which becomes a prominent feature here, and her final melodic shape of a descending 4th followed by an ascending major 2nd is replicated as the open ended melodic cadence.

James Burton, November 2024