O Lord, hear my prayer…

“O Lord, hear…” is a study in chromatic heterophony with pedal, based on modes derived from Byzantine echoi, the modal systems of pitch organization still in use in the service music of Eastern Christian Orthodox churches.

In the tradition of Paul Constantinescu, and later Ștefan Niculescu, the piece explores the implications of recovering the modal treasury of Byzantine origin and reusing that material for the forging of new modal formations. These new “pseudo-Byzantine” modes prove especially compelling in simultaneity, and in my piece they clothe the entire nuanced range of polyphonic expression, from heterophony to polyphony, including some utterances difficult to categorize, in which the polyphonic “lines” are in themselves chordal structures.

The melodic material is freely derived from these new modal formations, yet more than once it approximates, or even directly takes over, authentic Byzantine melodic formulas.

The vertical result, that is, the harmony of the piece, revisits Olivier Messiaen’s concept of added sounds in chords, though what I seek in fact is to reproduce, in a controlled context, the natural phenomenon of inharmonic partials, those overtones of a given fundamental whose pitch escapes the mathematical model of the natural harmonic series. My experiment took shape in a system based on the precise notation of the dynamic intensity of each sound within a given chordal structure. Beyond yielding more finely defined harmonic colors, the system also offers the ability to transfigure a given chord through the continual variation of the dynamic parameter in some of its key tones.

From a formal point of view, the piece arches from exteriority toward interiority, its construction relying heavily on delayed expectation and on opposing planes. A number of clearly defined musical realities, recognizable through the specificity and consistency of the elementary parameters that define them: writing, instrumentation, dynamics, harmony, and so forth, evolve fragmentarily, in iterations, along apparently parallel trajectories, only to converge at last toward an organic and homogeneous musical sense.

The generative impulse, an elliptical thematic incipit on the text “O Lord, hear…,” undergoes a slow becoming characterized by transmutations of register and instrumentation, as well as by the setting in motion of subsidiary processes and secondary thematic material, such as the fugato drawn from Psalm 50, “Have mercy on me, O God,” so that in the final part of the piece it may attain its fulfillment, both justificatory and apotheotic, on the text of the first verse of Psalm 142, “O Lord, hear my prayer…”

The multitude of intensely heterophonic passages on texts from the messianic psalms, Old Testament prophetic echoes concerning the life and activity of Christ, shattered by the solo interventions of the coryphaei and interwoven with the principal plane, have their own becoming as well, made explicit here by the sudden conversion of the monodic voice into harmonic voice, see for instance the polyphony of harmonies in the passage “You are My Son, today I have begotten You.”

Last but not least, the recitatives evolve into solos through augmentation and melodic-rhythmic and registral diversification, and find their own fulfillment, sublimating themselves into the extreme upper register, at the limit of the ineffable, in the responsorial passage of the two solo sopranos, on the text “From the womb, before the morning star, I have begotten You.”

The coda concludes the entire edifice in an assertive fashion, placing it within immediate reality, in the perspective of the practicing Christian, for whom the Christic model transcends the sphere of meditation and becomes transfigured life, lived in prayer.