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Initium Evangelii
(Jesu Christi, Filii Dei)

Date

8,26-8,31 2020

Instrumentation

Natural Voice

Length

Indeterminate

Note on Notation

Comments

As I first started my development of a highly personal recitative with the prologue to the Gospel of John, the idea came to me to finish the prologue cycle, that leading to the composition of the prologue to Luke. After composing Sicut in Prologo Evangelium Secundum Lucam it became apparent to me that to finish the cycle of texts that are all subtantially different in their rhetorical qualities would allow me to fully realize the variety of ways that I could produce compositions of text alone.

And this realization became a necessity, for I began to see a problem in the rather the limited range of emotion in The Consolation of Poverty and Besitzen. The different traits of each Gospel is found in its prologue, and the prologue always acts a preparation of the tonal qualities of the books. The information that the writer chooses to highlight and omit allows the reader to recognize the aspects of Christ's ministry that the writer believes is important for the promulgation of his message, and this too allows for me as a composer to highlight certains aspects of the text through the various means of declamation available.

This final prolouge, from Mark, is much more wordy in the sense that it sets up the proclamation of the Good News, thus I intended to present much more of it as purely spoken recitation, with the words of the prophet, of God, and of Christ following a psalm tone, and the spoken words of John the Baptist as intoned text.

It might be prudent to admit that the concept of the landscape of the score, the imagistic quality of the text as important to the reading of the music, might have gone too far in this work, as the spoken text appears as great tendrils of interwoven lines that are difficult to read on first glance (one familiar enough with the text might have an easier time noticing it), though I still believe it is possible to decipher it.

Sean Patrick Ignatius Tartaglia