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The Consolation of Poverty

Date

2018/2,17-4,6 2020

Instrumentation

Untrained voice, glass harp,   bell

Length

Indeterminate

Note on Notation

Comments

A recomposition of a work initially written on a series of notecards after a stint with Antoine Beuger in 2018, The Consolation of Poverty is a Lectio in the genre of Liturgical recitative. A juxtaposition of Ecclesiastes and Pauline Epistles, the words of the ecclesiastic are responded to with the advice of the apostle.

Concerning technique, the work represents a development of the adistematic notation first used in Sicut in Prologo Evangelium Ioannis into one that is indeterminate enough to be intoned by an untrained voice.

Sean Patrick Ignatius Tartaglia

Latin text:
Vanitas Vanitatum
Vanitas Vanitatum
Vidi cuncta quae fiunt sub sole,
et ecce unisersa vanitas

Magnificavi opera mea,
coacervavi mihi argentum et aurum,
et supergresssus sum opibus
Cumque me convertissem ad universam
opera quae fecerunt manus meae
vidi in omnibus vanitatem
et nihil permenare sub sole

Et idcirco taeduit me vitae meae
Quid einem proderit ho mini de universo labore suo
Cuncti dies eius doloribus et aerumnis pleni sunt

ego enim didici in quibus sum, sufficens esse
Scio et humiliari, scio et abundare:
et satiari, et esurire, et abundare, et penuriam pati.

Rogamus autem vos, ut abundetis manus,
et operam detis ut qui eti sitis,
et ut vestrum negotium agatis,
et opereminimanibus vestris,
et ut honeste ambuletis as eos qui foris sunt:
et nullius aliquid de sideretis.

Hoc itaque dico, fratres:
tempus breve est:
reliquum est, ut et qui habent qxores, tamquam non habents sunt:
et qui flent, tamquam non flentes:
et qui gaudent, tamquam non gaudentes:
et qui emunt, tamquam non possidentes:

et qui utunutur hoc mundo, tamquam non untuntur
praeterit enim figura hujus mundi.

English text:
Vanity of vanities
Vanity of vanities
I have seen all the things under the sun,
and all is vanity

I have built myself great works,
I have amassed for myself gold and silver,
and I supassed in riches
and when I turned myself to all the works which my hands had wrought,
and to the labors wherein I had labored in vain,
I saw in all things vanity and that nothing was lasting under the sun.

And therefore I was weary of my life,
For what profit shall a man have of his labor,
when all his days are full or sorrows and miseries?

For I have learned, in whatever state I am in, to be content,
I know both how to be brought low, and I know how to abound:
to be full, and to be hungry,
both to abound, and to suffer need.

But we entreat your, brothers, to abound in more,
And that you use your endeavour to be quiet,
and that you do your own business, and work with your own hands,
and that you walk honestly towards them that are without;
and that you want nothing of any man's.

This I say, brothers:
time is short:
it be that, those who have wives, be as if they had none;
and those who weep, as if they wept not;
and those that rejoice, as if they rejoice not;
and those who have, as if they had not;

and they that use this world, as if they had not:
for the way of this world passes away.