SATB choir SKU: CA.965500
Composed by Ko Matsushita. Edited by Stefan Schuck. Contemporary Choir Music. Sacred vocal music, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, Communion. Full score. Composed 2012. 4 pages. Duration 3 minutes. Carus Verlag #CV 09.655/00. Published by Carus Verlag (CA.965500). ISBN 9790007164409. Language: Latin.
For faithful Catholics it is the great mystery, and for those who are not Christian believers it is incomprehensible, possibly even off-putting - the mystery of the Eucharist. As far back as the late medieval period, the verse prayer Ave verum inimitably captures the special atmosphere of the contradiction between a terrible death and the redemption of mankind. Matsushita sets an early version of this prayer for the Eucharist in motet-like ABA form. A floating melody, alternating precisely between major and minor and first sung solo by all four voices in transposition, introduces the piece in a contemplative style. The scale is then altered in the counterpoint to a pure Dorian mode, contrasting in the middle section at the text vere passum, where Matsushita accompanies the increasingly wide-ranging melody and its chromatic, augmented intervals, by increasingly dissonant chordal shifts like a fauxbourdon. From this the tonal high point develops into an almost perfect F major, which then finally picks up on the opening motif for the added lines of text O Jesu dulcis, o Jesu pie... before ebbing away in F major. Voice range: S: des' - fis'' / A:gdeg - d'' / T: cdeg - as' / B: F - c'.
