O nata lux after Tallis (2020) for SATB choir, unaccompanied

Commissioned by: the Yale Norfolk Festival Choral Workshop, Simon Carrington, director

Durata: ca. 4:30

Premiere:  Ensemble Invocatio, Daniel Knaggs, cond., 03/26/2022 and 03/27/2022 in Bydgoszcz and Warsaw, Poland

Listen below to the USA premiere of O nata lux from the Yale Norfolk Choral Festival:

Watch below O nata lux after Tallis sung by Ensemble Invocatio, Daniel Knaggs, cond.

Program notes:

The fourth installment in my ongoing After Motets Project, O nata lux (after Tallis) was written in response to a motet composed by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). My new setting preserves much of Tallis’s original melodic ideas, although presenting these in a new light. My motivic and harmonic decisions were intended to highlight aspects of this text, linking certain words to one another and illustrating realities pertaining to both heaven and earth.

I crystalized Tallis’s opening 3-note motive (his soprano melody for “O nata”) as a recurring fragment that is hummed and sung freely at different moments of the new motet. The free and sporadic humming of this fragment reflects the text’s closing prayer: “Grant that we may be members of Your Blessed Body”, by unifying all the separate moving parts into a single chord condensed to a single pitch at the end of the piece.

Translation:

O Light born of Light
Jesus, Redeemer of the world,
With loving-kindness
Accept our praise and our prayer.
You who consented to being clothed in flesh
For the sake of the lost,
Grant that we may be members
Of Your Blessed Body.