Come, Shepherds, Deck Your Heads was written in 2004 at the request of the then Bartók Trio.
This was a momentous period in my composing life. Not only did I decide to focus mainly on traditional chamber music, but at the same time, I started using more and more traditional and historical folk and religious music as a starting point for my compositions.
In the 2002 piano quintet T’Andernaken, I had already used Gregorian chant and melodies from Sweelinck and the Antwerp Songbook, and this continues from the grand Super Suite (2016), on Gregorian chant and the Geneva Psalms, into the monumental Songs of War & Peace (2020), on melodies from the Thirty Years’ War.
The composer Béla Bartók, whom I admire, and after whom Nancy’s trio was named, also based his work on traditional music – the folk music he collected and studied.
He, too, played the balanced game of repetition and development inherited from Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. He, too, even then, went against the prevailing modernism: from highly complex and innovative his music became increasingly simple and historical.
Like that momentous period, my 2004 trio represents a ‘metamorphosis’. From distant, abstract darkness, it moves to a luminous interiority in which folk music and historical elements play an increasingly prominent role. After a complex, rapid, dark opening movement, the slow second movement refers to the distant gamelan, and eventually, in a radiantly bright final movement, both tango and historical Dutch folk music appear.
In the first movement, gentle, lyrical clarinet lines are opposed to hammering, nervous rhythms in the violin. Both types of music sprout from the very first, simple opening motif of a descending whole tone. Unlike in the classical sonata (with its ‘recapitulation’), this motif constantly takes on new forms in different musical styles and will continue to do so in the other movements of the piece. Hence the title Metìccio: a mixture of types and genres.
The second movement is a capricious, pastoral Nocturne in Bartók’s ‘night music’ style. The Indonesian gamelan plays a significant role, as it sometimes does with Bartók. In a silent tropical night, full of gamelan-like piano sounds, feverish urgings from violin and clarinet culminate in a fierce Balinese devil dance, while, like a phantom out of the darkness, a brief quotation looms from Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, (no.6 ‘In memoriam Gustav Mahler’).
The final movement I called Jeu-parti. In this song genre of the medieval trouvères, courtly lovers sing in dialogue about their different conceptions of love. In my music, the instruments sing to each other in various styles, culminating in a tango-like conclusion. From that twentieth-century erotic style suddenly emerges a paraphrase of Come, Shepherds, Deck Your Heads, a beautiful melody from Valerius’ 1626 Gedenck-Clanck that sings of mourning for a lost love. The fierce tango nevertheless brings the instruments together and the melodic metamorphoses of the piece to an end.
