Motet (piano duet)

Motet was commisioned by the 1998 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts with financial support from Creative New Zealand.

It was first performed by Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons at St Andrew’s on the Terrace, Wellington, New Zealand, on 19 March 1998. It is a 15-minute single-movement work for piano duo (1 piano 4-hands).

The material ranges from quasi-freely notated sections to tightly scored driving rhythmic passages. It’s a workout for the players and requires both dreamy lyricism and propulsive dynamic playing.

When writing this entry in the website I went lookign for the original program note and found this:

MOTET (programme note)

In current musical usage, motet usually refers to an unaccompanied, sacred choral piece, often with a Latin text, and often composed in a deliberately archaic style that looks back to the polyphonic composers of the Renaissance.  But the term - derived from the French mot, or "word" - has been in use since about 1250 and has undergone many changes of meaning.

An outgrowth of the 12th-century clausula, the motet was the climax of early polyphony in Western music.  The clausula was derived from a fragment of Gregorian chant (the cantus firmus), sung to a regular rhythm by one voice (the "tenor") and elaborated on by one or two more voices.  When one of these added voices was fitted with a new text in Latin or French (mots), it became a motetus;  the term soon designated the entire composition. The first motets, therefore, were often in two languages simultaneously.
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In the 19th and 20th centuries the motet has been treated as an antique genre.  Brahms, Franck, and Verdi composed choral motets in the 19th century, as did Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, and Peter Maxwell Davies in the 20th.

Motet has been recorded by Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons on an upcoming Rattle Records CD of Psathas’s Music; the CD is titled “Rhythm Spike”.

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Hilarious. Obviously copeid from the internet and doesn't say a word about the piece itself! But it sounds clever.....

Listenign back to the works I created around the time of composing Motet it's clear, in retrospect, I was trying to decide on how to go forward as a composer. I felt the pressure that most people do after graduating from a composition program - there were appropriate choices (for the times) and outmoded choices. I also had the tension between my experiences playing in a Greek band all the time I was at university -experiencing the intensity of connection spontaneously triggered by music in a room full of people - and the 'music of ideas', which I was also very drawn to. This piece, Motet, was an attempt to integrate those two 'ways'. Others are the Piano Quintet, the middle movement of the piano concerto Three Psalms, Stream 3, Seikilos, even Drum Dances. Eventually I was able to shake this whole dilemma off and - for better or worse - just wrote what I wanted to hear.

Michael and Deirdre were wonderful - I was so lucky that they premiered the work.

There's beautiful video below of Tarek Assam's choreography to this piece.

One final note. This is one of the only pieces in which I've used a freer kind of notation (an example in one of the score pages below). I came up against the challenge of doing so with the technology at hand (capturing my live playing of sections as MIDI, then transcribing, then makign it legible and coherent for a performer). This challenge (a result of the technological limitations), and the time involved, pretty much shut down that avenue of exploration in my writing.