Published
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (“I Mourn the Dead, I Call the Living”) for eight-track tape is a musical composition created in 1980 by Jonathan Harvey, with the assistance of Stanley Haynes and Xavier Rodet, commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The two sounds contrasted are the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral, England and the voice of the composer’s son Dominic, at the time a chorister there, both recorded by John Whiting. The text is taken from that written on the bell: Horas Avolantes Numero, Mortuos Plango: Vivos ad Preces Voco (“I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead: the living I call to prayer”). Music V was used to analyze and transform the sounds.
The music is ‘octophonic’, being projected into the auditorium through a cube of eight channels: “the ideal listener is ‘inside’ the bell, its partials distributed in space; the boy’s voice flies around, derived from, yet becoming the bell sound.””The eight sections are based on one of the principal eight lowest partials. Chords are constructed from the repertoire of thirty-three partials [of the bell], and modulations from one area of the spectrum to another are achieved by means of glissandi.”
The title of the work comes from the inscription on the tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral: “HORAS AVOLANTES NUMERO, MORTUOS PLANGO, VIVOS AD PRECES VOCO”—“I count the fleeting hours, I mourn the dead, I call the living to prayer.” This is precisely what any church bell does, expressed with particular beauty.
The work is based entirely on the spectrum of that bell and on the voice of the composer’s son, who was then a chorister at the cathedral. In the second link above, Harvey explains:
The bell counts time—each section begins with a stroke at a different pitch. In itself it is a “dead” sound, with all the richness of its sonority; the boy represents the living element. The bell surrounds the audience, as though they were inside it, while the boy “flies” around them like a free spirit.
In 1980 the sounds were recorded and taken to IRCAM, the institution that commissioned the work. There they were manipulated by computer, played back and mixed with synthetic simulations of themselves. Since these were digital creations, they could be transformed internally to an extraordinary degree. We could, for example, move imperceptibly from a vowel sung by the boy into a complex bell spectrum consisting of thirty-three partials. The pitch structure is based entirely on those partials, with their strange, obsessive intervals: harmonies are selected from among them, and one selection passes into another through glissando.