Variation on Dufay's Nuper Rosarum Flores

organ or microtonal organ, two players

Duration: 10 min.

I wrote this work as a response to the death of my dear friend Gilbert Blount, a music historian and composer whose teachings that music's rational basis underpins its voice of human feeling and compassion inspired my own work and career. One of the pieces we studied was Dufay's "Nuper Rosarum Flores," which represents in music the mathematics of the divine temple. In this piece I have creatively reimagined and extended the proportions of Dufay's medieval isorhythms (melodic and rhythmic patterns) to two organists playing interlocking patterns and drone canons.