Paranymphus Adiens

For violoncello and treble choir. Texts from Swedish-Finish song collection "Piae cantiones ecclesiasticae et scholasticae veterum Episcoporum, 1512" (Ancient Ecclesiastical and Academic Songs) in Latin and Finish. Composed in January 2003 for inclusion in the CBC Records collection "Puer natus in Bethlehem, Alleluia!" with Roman Borys, cello and the Elmer Iseler Singers under the direction of Lydia Adams.

Program Note

In the fall of 2002 I was asked by choral conductor Lydia Adams to provide a personal take on the Medieval Christmas song Paranymphus Adiens for a Christmas concert in mid-December by her choir, The Elmer Iseler Singers. The repertory of the concert was to be recorded the following month for a CBC Records compilation CD. I was in the middle of another commission with an impending deadline which made my inclusion in the concert impossible, but I said that I might be able to have it ready for the January recording. Then, typical of me, I forgot all about it. One weekend in January I was in my rural home in Uxbridge, ON and was visited by Maria, my then 12-year-old daughter and a few of her friends. In the middle of the day, the phone rang and I was reminded that the following day was the recording of . . . "your song" and they needed the parts that very day to rehearse. As initial panic waned, I took my daughter and her friends to a nearby resort for a four-hour-long skiing instruction and buried myself in the studio to address the urgent task within the allotted time. It was the shortest interval of time that I have ever composed anything that I wanted to keep afterwards. Surprisingly, such projects usually become among my favourite ones. Given the tight time constraints, I could not enter the text and the original music with any critical ear so I kept the vocal parts intact as in the original organum and I added a cello part to the original material. Besides my panic, my approach was informed by the fact that, even though firmly embedded in the European psyche, Christmas was a Middle Eastern story with a different culture than the one we associate with it. The cello redresses this by singing in non-western musical modes and with glissandi, providing a cultural counterpoint to the borrowed medieval material. Paranymphus Adiens was composed, parts copied and faxed to their destinations just minutes before I had to pick up the children and spend the rest of the day with them. The following day, at the Grace Church-on-the-hill in Toronto Paranymphus Adiens was recorded by Roman Borys and the Elmer Iseler Singers and included in the "Puer natus in Bethlehem, Alleluia!" recording.

—Christos Hatzis