Polyphony for World Voice Day

The human voice is probably one of our most valuable treasures, to which so much wonderful music has been composed since the beginnings of our civilisation.  April 16th was chosen since 1999 to  celebrate worldwide the phenomenon of voice. Its aim is to demonstrate the enormous importance of the voice in daily lives, as a critical aspect of effective and healthy communication, bringing awareness to the need of preventing voice problems, training the artistic voice, and researching its function and application.

In 2018 Portugal was on the Top-10 countries with most events to celebrated the World Voice Day. In 2012 I contributed to this celebration organising a concert with Ensemble da Sé de Angra, which I directed at the time. This year I would like to associate to this celebration with a video which goes literally inside the human voice. A set of micro-cameras inserted through the nose to follow the vocal cords in action while singing… which is a bit creepy. The video was directed by Sara Lundberg.

The music sung by the four singers is the Kyrie from Missa O magnum mysterium by Tomás Luis de Victoria. This is a parody mass based on the famous motet by the Spanish composer, and was printed in his second book of masses in 1592. The work is set for four voices (SATB) and in the video, each of the singers vocal cords are depicted in a separated box, thus, one may watch the stresses made to them and how each of the voice parts behaves. The modern edition of this work is available HERE. To me, Renaissance vocal polyphony may well be one of the best examples on how much sounding and musical perfection can be extracted from the human voice, and this video shows a good example of that. The purity of harmony in Victoria’s Kyrie is amazing and it was a very-well chosen example of that beautiful opening motive of Victoria’s motet O magnum mysterium.