Ubi Caritas
This Ubi Caritas takes as its starting point the same Renaissance-styled duo I created and used for Sundered Sublime, though unfolds it in a differing direction. It started as an a cappella trio (alto, tenor, bass), and later I adapted it further into a piece with piano and electric guitar joining the trio of voices.
The piece opens with material from the original duo for alto and tenor, while the piano and electric guitar offer an off-kilter, pointillistic counterpoint. The piano and electric guitar echo rhythmically warped fragments of the lines sung by the duo. As the duo reaches their first point of cadence, the piano's and electric guitar's activities start to gain momentum. From here they step into the foreground in a more highly active exchange of embellishments on a melodic fragment from the original duo– while the alto and tenor, joined by the bass, slip into a suspended, slightly contrapuntal harmony.
This image shows a passage found later in the piece. Following a point of cadence, the undulating intensity of the instruments' pointillistic and warped fragmentary imitations of the vocal materials reaches a point of rupture and then stretches out into a sprawling, glassy stream of more single-note points. As this stretches on the voices come in and out with a fragment taken from the original duo. At the end of each of these refrain the harmony pivots, and the instruments echo it in a more recognizable (though still warped) mirror of that fragment.
This activity builds out to the climactic passage, shown above: Exsultemus et in ipso jucundemur. (Let us rejoice and be glad in Him). In this section of the piece, the instruments are in open discord with the voices– both harmonically as well as gesturally/materially. The voices exult in sweetly consonant homophony, while the instruments crash and peal around flourishes of arpeggiated fury. At this passage's point of cadence, the discord is somewhat resolved, and the instruments stride and then tip-toe up into their highest registers, stretching out into an even glassier stream of single-note points than at any point earlier in the piece.
From the moment described above and through the end of the piece, the piano and electric guitar will not deviate from this glassy texture– even as the voices resume with another rather saccharine homophony: Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero (And lets us love one another sincerely from the heart). At the end of the piece, the voices conclude with a brief "amen" while the instruments carry on in utter disregard of their musical decorum, then wink out a few bars later as if merely vanishing from sight rather than reaching any meaningful conclusion.
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Also like Sundered Sublime, this piece is a reflection upon the complicated nature of the contemporary experience of Christianity. The instruments serve as echoes, or ghosts, or perhaps fruit, accumulating alongside and behind the more straightforward materials written for the voices. They reveal what I believe to be a more honest illustration of the legacy many of today's spiritual communities produce: something complicated by the intermingling of sincerity and duplicity, selflessness and selfishness, benevolence and malice.
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