

Flo Menezes
Contrafacta
Duration: 13'
Instrumentation details:
horn in F
trumpet in Bb
trumpet in C
tenor trombone
tuba
Contrafacta
Translation, reprints and more

Flo Menezes
ContrafactaOrchestration: for brass quintet and electronics in real time ad libitum
Type: Dirigierpartitur





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Work introduction
Introduction and general conditions for the performance
The term contrafactum (plural: contrafacta) refers in the music of the Renaissance to vocal pieces with a substituted text (a sacred one instead of the original secular text, or vice-versa). Contrafacta transposes this concept: a musical original source in itself is considered as a “text”, and its own facture is “substituted” by another “text”, as if I was visiting an old facsimile through the looking glass of a Stravinsky… In this case, the masterpiece Mille regretz by Josquin Desprez! Contrafacta accomplishes literally a “trans-textualized” re-version of this genial, highly expressive piece by Josquin.
By this way, Contrafacta retakes in a given sense my concept of TransFormants – musical “formants” which cross the whole time of a given concert – and, although not being a “TransFormante”, it interweaves its references along the whole concert in which the piece is inserted: Contrafacta should ideally (although not necessarily) be preceded by the transcription I made for brass quartet of Josquin’s piece as well as by the “à la Stravinsky” transfigured version of it for brass quintet (both figuring as Appendix to the score). If Contrafacta is preceded by those musical references, both of them must necessarily be played in order to perceive the degrees of metamorphosis of the original Josquin’s materials until achieving Contrafacta itself, and both Appendixes must be well separated along the entire concert and also from Contrafacta, which should ideally be performed as the last piece of the recital.
Contrafacta is conceived for brass quintet with electronics in real time (live-electronics), but the piece can eventually be performed without electronics too. The electronics multiplies spatially, harmonically and rhythmically the musical structures and provides the ambience with a reverberation which is typical from liturgical musical contexts, evoking the past of the genre (of the brass ensemble as instrumental ensemble of the sacred ancient works), but I decided also to allow the piece being performed without electronics in order to make possible its performances in different contexts, answering to the request of ensembles of this genre.
Contrafacta signifies indeed a culminating point of my studies on the music of the Renaissance, discovering in those treasures many common points with the contemporary and most radical way of listening to sounds and to music. Many are the principles that link the music of that period to Contrafacta. The first one is this common praxis of borrow the facture from an older music and using it as main material for a new composition, in a high level of referentiality. Another one is the use of rapid, evasive notes in the musical texture, in a rather virtuosic manner (mostly in the Renaissance music figured as downwards figures), which were described by the Latin word currentes (from “running”); it has motivated the very beginning of Contrafacta, besides many passages in which quick notes can be heard as main traces of the texture.
Besides that, the original Spanish concept of “variations”, described as diferencias, is also important for the whole conception of the piece: one deals here indeed with three “different” appearances of Josquin’s Mille regretz, but always in a harmonically radical transfigured way. My techniques of proportional projections (I decided as a challenge not to use this time my cyclic modules) transform the original material through three distinct pitch ranges in such a way that there is actually no musical quotation, but just slight insights into and reminiscences of the original source. And some of the phrases of the main structure of the piece are themselves varied when they return back to the surface.
Although the score is presented as a “general” score, Contrafacta refers also to the common writing praxis of the Renaissance, which seems as an absolutely surprising procedure under our actual point of view: the masters of that period used to write down polyphonic music in individual parts rather than having in their hands a general “score” (with simultaneous view of all the musical lines implied)! Either having in mind the already written parts or comparing what they were writing down with the individual parts already composed, the composers used not to write polyphony down into a general musical system of simultaneous staves… Although the timing of the figures was absolutely under control by the Renaissance masters, this procedure gave way to rich metric textures with a given interdependency between the individual voices, and this point led me to try to conceive some of the moments of my piece – specially then those in which the original harmonic fabric would almost overcome to the surface, risking to reveal a greater similarity to the original, modal/tonal texture – rather as individual tempi, de-constructing the musical facture and proposing therefore a kind of kaleidoscopic fabric with a rich timing interlacing between the instruments. In such moments, which are written in proportional notation and contrast with the proper “scores” of the “choral” moments (written as traditional notation), the musicians play their figures totally independently from the others.
The origin and original praxis of the brass ensemble are obviously also reflected into my piece. Such ensembles were mostly formed to play transcription of original vocal pieces, as it is the case here. The link with military context is ironically exposed at the very beginning of the piece with its theatrical happening – not to speak of the very end, through which the musicians go out from stage and from the theater while playing synchronously as a kind of transformed, fractionated hymn –, which is drastically opposed both to the religious character of the reverberate sound when played with electronics (referring to cathedrals and therefore to the religious character of ancient music) and even to some “jazz-like” passages as well, which transpire in some moments, in another trans-textualized strategy of the many meanings of Contrafacta.
Last but not least, I should mention the intellectual interplay which was so beloved by the ancient masters, even by Josquin, who used his own name to numerically constitute musical structures: along Contrafacta a freezing process of pitches (when played with electronics) gradually accumulates five notes, which are summed to the constant five notes chords of the ensemble. Thus from a certain point of the piece we have five constant “fixed” notes (which are done by the live-electronics and can also vary from performance to performance) functioning as pivot-notes of other five constantly varied notes provided by the chords, making together ten notes, i.e., the sum of the letters of my own name: Flo Menezes.
What is necessary to perform this work?
The score for the electronics is the same of the general score.
A Max patch is required for the performance and may be requested to the composer: