Victimae: The Compositional Techniques
- Michele Viviani
- 15 minutes ago
- 10 min read
On June 21, 2026, I will release my new album "Dorian": it will be a work that continues, with a different musical language, the experience realized in my last album Victimae — that is, composing a series of pieces all based on the Gregorian chant sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes.
In this post, I offer a presentation of the compositional techniques employed in the album Victimae, while awaiting the new work. This is a rather "technical" post and is structured as a comparison between my pieces and the compositions that inspired me. I wrote it primarily as a personal opportunity for reflection and synthesis on the project undertaken.
The index of the post is as follows:
1) Victimae: general structure of the project
2) Songs
2.1) Glass' Pages
2.2) Fur Arvo
2.3) Death Mountain
2.4) Bela the Monk
2.5) Victimae
1) Victimae: General structure of the project
The Victimae collection — released as an album on July 31, 2024 — consists of five short compositions for voices and percussion, united by the fact that they all use, in some form, the Gregorian chant sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes.
The goal I set for this work was to subject this melody to different elaborations, limiting myself to two-voice writing, and to derive these elaboration techniques from the contributions of various composers whose language I wanted to explore more deeply.
During the development of the project, I realized the increasing importance of the rhythmic element in my writing, so I added percussion to the voices, which also provide timbral variety and spatial openness. The existing version of the work is performed entirely by me, overdubbing the various parts, and recorded in my home studio: the need for it to be performed (and recorded) this way certainly influenced the choice of vocal ranges, the simplicity of the percussion parts, and the brevity of the pieces.
In the following paragraphs, I will present each piece, describing the compositional techniques employed and referring to the compositions from which I drew inspiration.
Victimae is available on all platforms (Spotify, YouTube, Instagram) and can also be listened to and purchased directly from this website.
Below is the score of the Victimae Paschali Laudes sequence in modern notation.
Here is the overall picture of Victimae as it has taken shape in conclusion:
Brano | Strumentazione | Tecniche Compositive |
|---|---|---|
Glass' Pages | Alto, Tenor, Woodblock | additive procedure according to Philip Glass' “Two Pages” |
Fur Arvo | Alto, Tenor, Glockenspiel | Tintinnabuli by Arvo Part, see "Fur Alina" |
Death Mountain | Soprano, Alto, Tenor Glockenspiel, frame drum | additive procedure according to La Monte Young "Death Chant” + Fauxbourdon elements |
Bela The Monk | two male voices | Accompanied melody based on Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No. 41 + vocal timbre suggested by Meredith Monkonk |
Victimae | two male voices, glockenspiel, bongos, woodblocks, frame drum | Renaissance note-against-note counterpoint + contrasting sections, see Toru Takemitsu, November Steps |
2.1) Glass' Pages
This composition employs two voices - tenor and alto - and one percussion instrument (woodblock), which expresses the basic pulse. The title refers to Two Pages by Philip Glass, from which the "additive mechanism" on which the composition develops is derived.
My piece is based on a group of 5 notes corresponding to the first 5 notes of the Victimae Paschali Laudes melody: starting from these, phrases are constructed — each repeated 4 times — that, in the first part of the composition, gradually increase in length, and in the second half instead decrease, until they consist of only the initial note. For example, the first phrase is composed precisely of the 5 starting notes (plus a rest), the second phrase is made up of the first 5 notes followed by the first 4 (plus a rest), and so on. In the first part of the composition, the alto voice is an octave above the tenor voice; in the second half — where the phrases begin to shorten — it is at the twelfth.
Let us now return to the composition by Philip Glass, for a detailed analysis of which please refer to Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), pages 288–292. The additive process would become one of the driving forces of his compositional technique for about ten years:
It is essentially a rhythmic procedure (Potter, p. 270) that Glass began to develop through his work experience with the Indian sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar (Potter, p. 258). The additive mechanism employed in my piece corresponds — for the most part — to that used in the first minutes of Glass’s composition, shown in the image below. Two Pages is an instrumental piece (for piano doubled at the octave by electric organ):
The application of this technique to a vocal piece first required the insertion of a pause to allow the voices to breathe between phrases. This breaks the flow of notes, making the underlying mechanism more apparent to the listener. This "interruption" — together with the significantly slower tempo — makes impossible that kind of "droning" effect that emerges from listening to certain sections of Philip Glass’s composition, where a single note stands out within the flow.
2.2) Fur Arvo
It is a piece written for two voices — alto and tenor — and glockenspiel. The compositional technique used is tintinnabuli, created by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and initially employed in instrumental compositions such as Für Alina, and later in countless pieces for various ensembles, including vocal ones. Another example is the Kyrie that opens the Berliner Messe.
In my composition Fur Arvo, the lower voice arpeggiates the notes of the G minor chord, while the upper voice performs the Victimae Paschali Laudes melody from the beginning up to the notes corresponding to the word "peccatores."
The tintinnabuli technique is indeed a two-voice writing procedure with voices moving in the same rhythm (plus a drone), where the lower voice plays only the notes of the triad built on the tonic in a kind of arpeggio (for example, if we are in G minor, the lower voice can play only the notes G, B♭, and D), while the upper voice generally proceeds with a stepwise melody using all the notes of the scale. As Arvo Pärt himself has stated, the artistic effectiveness of this technique depends on the ability to reduce — I would say, to a certain extent — the obvious separation of roles between the two voices, that is, between the upper voice performing a melody and the lower voice realizing an accompanying arpeggio.
This is (in my opinion only partially) avoided by Pärt through various devices that I have tried to identify: using homorhythmic movement, choosing rather slow tempos that make the arpeggio less evident, frequently interrupting the melodic flow of the upper voice, and selecting — when there are long notes — intervals between the two voices that create some form of tension. In fact, I believe the charm of this technique lies precisely in its ambiguity: the movement of the two voices evokes counterpoint, but in true counterpoint the melodies involved correspond to the number of voices.
In tintinnabuli, there is only one melody with a kind of shifting drone accompaniment that allows the exploration of the resonances of the mode used.
In the case of my piece, where the upper voice performs a true theme, I proceeded by dividing the melody into semi-phrases and using intervals of a 9th, 10th, and 11th in the phrase endings, similarly to the endings in Für Alina.
The percussion — in this case, the glockenspiel — serves four functions in my composition: first, it acts as a drone; second, it accentuates the beginning and end of the semi-phrases, providing a rhythmic structure to the work; third, it adds an enveloping component to the phrase that evokes the effect of the piano for which Pärt’s Für Alina was composed; and finally, it rings like a bell.
2.3) Death Mountain
This piece employs three voices (tenor, alto, soprano) and two percussion instruments (glockenspiel and frame drum). The title refers to the composition Death Chant by American composer La Monte Young, from which I drew inspiration for the particular type of repetition process used.
My composition is created by alternating two blocks of phrases. The first block of phrases again uses the first 5 notes of Victimae Paschali Laudes, which are progressively aggregated (first the first two notes with the second note sustained for 4 beats, then the first three notes with the third note sustained for 4 beats, and so on): this group of phrases is used as a kind of refrain.
The second block of phrases consists of repeating the same group of 5 notes in retrograde form (from the last to the first) four times. Each time that — after the exact repetition of the first block — the retrograde repetition returns, one note is removed.
Regarding the composition I started from, namely Death Chant by La Monte Young, it is a unique piece in the output of this composer, known for his works of drone-based writing and improvisation and for Just Intonation applied to the piano in the epic work The Well-Tuned Piano. Death Chant is based on a form of additive repetition similar to that of Glass (and preceding it), which would later be extensively developed by other minimalist composers, but then abandoned by La Monte Young in his subsequent works.
As Potter highlights (cit. p. 56) — who also reproduces the full score of the piece — La Monte Young’s work is a piece for male voices and percussion consisting of three notes in a minor mode that are subjected to various processes of addition and subtraction, similar to those later used by Glass.
The percussion is employed on the last note and — at a certain point in the composition — on the first note of each measure.
The version I provided above for listening, although it does not fully follow the score’s indications, I believe expresses its spirit well.
Returning to my piece, I believe that the overall atmosphere of La Monte Young’s composition is preserved, as well as, of course, the use of mechanisms of expansion and contraction of a limited melodic group.
As in the case of the first composition of this cycle, the Victimae Paschali sequence is thus used as a melodic fragment.
Regarding the voice distribution: the alto sings the same notes as the tenor but an octave higher, while the soprano voice is a third above the alto.
This simple procedure, absent in Young’s composition, partially recalls the medieval Fauxbourdon technique, which arranges two homorhythmic voices at the distance of a third and a sixth above a cantus firmus based on the original Gregorian melody.
2.4) Bela The Monk
It is worth clarifying now that in this cycle of compositions I have proceeded with a movement of progressive autonomy from the original starting model. Let me explain: while in the first piece the technique taken from Philip Glass was employed quite faithfully, at this point in the cycle we are faced with a composition much freer from its reference models. Bela the Monk is written for two male voices and starts from two premises: the first is the significance of Béla Bartók among composers who revived modal harmony within 20th-century composition; the second is the importance of his music — and in particular the collection of piano studies Mikrokosmos — for the development of the language of the American composer Meredith Monk, as she herself has acknowledged several times.
Bela the Monk is composed of two main sections: in the first (repeated twice) I started from No. 41 of Mikrokosmos studies, titled "Melody with Accompaniment." From this, I derived the basic rhythm and the accompaniment structure based on two chords, which are performed by the lower voice.
I introduced some rhythmic modifications, to the accompaniment structure, adding elements useful for facilitating breath control in singing and for making harmonization with the upper voice easier. In the upper voice, the Victimae Paschali melody is performed — with a series of rhythmic adaptations and transposed a fifth higher — using the same section as in Fur Arvo. This first section ends with an echo-like repetition of the last four notes of the melody.
The second section of my piece develops this concluding four-note subsection and closes instead with the repetition of the first phrase of the piece twice. Thus, the piece has a general form of the type AbAbBa.
I believe Meredith Monk’s language influences all the compositions of Victimae: for listening, I include the piece Hocket from the beautiful album Facing North, recorded with Robert Een.
In this piece, one can appreciate, on one hand, the closeness to Bartók’s language and, on the other, the use of specific vowels — or vocal sounds — to characterize the two voices as instruments with a distinct timbre.
2.5) Victimae
The last piece of the Victimae cycle is written for two male voices and a percussion ensemble: glockenspiel, woodblock, bongos, and frame drum. Unlike the previous pieces, it does not apply the technique of a specific composer, but rather draws inspiration from certain formal choices, as I will explain below.
In the piece Victimae, two distinct musical events alternate. The first consists of a composition for two male voices written according to the rules of 16th-century vocal counterpoint in its "note against note" form, that is, homorhythmic counterpoint. The Victimae Paschali Laudes sequence is used as a cantus firmus and performed by the lower voice; once again, the sequence is employed up to the notes corresponding to the word "peccatores."
This two-voice composition is not performed continuously but broken into a series of sub-phrases. Between these sub-phrases, a second event is inserted, namely a musical phrase written for a percussion ensemble of three instruments (woodblock, bongos, frame drum). This phrase can be heard in its entirety only at the third "interruption"; in the others, at least one of the involved percussion instruments is absent. It is like a fragment of a dialogue involving three characters, but it can be heard in full only on its third repetition, while in the others one or two of the voices that compose it are missing.
The role of the glockenspiel, finally, is to define the ritual structure of the piece and rhythmically unite the two sound events of which it is composed.
The idea of alternating two different — and almost entirely unrelated — sound events was inspired by the practice of composers such as Toru Takemitsu (November Steps) and Olivier Messiaen (Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine), who work by repeatedly juxtaposing sections of different musical nature. In Takemitsu’s composition, for example, sections written for symphony orchestra are contrasted with others written for instruments from the Japanese musical tradition (see Peter Burt: The Music of Toru Takemitsu, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 116). I will return to discuss this composer in the coming months.
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