JEAN-LOUIS FLORENTZ, Debout sur le Soleil. Leduc 28229. Debout sur le Soleil is the title of a book by the chapelain à Notre-Dame and former African missionary Jacques Leclercq (Paris: Seuil, 1980). The score is subtitled “Chant de Resurrection,” and is supertitled “Sur le Miserere de Jacques Leclercq,” after a chapter in the book. For a thorough discussion of many aspects of this work, one can refer to the composer’s own “L’espace symphonique et la liturgie éthiopienne dans Debout sur le soleil, op. 8, pour orgue,” L’Orgue, no. 221 (1992): 21–33. But the remarkable intellectual and technical features brought to bear in this music are really almost incidental to a greater expressive, artistic, and spiritual inspiration that cannot quite so readily be committed to words.

Two unifying passages are the “refrain” and the “invitation,” each of which occurs four times, with the first “refrain” and the fourth “invitation” comprising, respectively, the beginning and ending of the work. The “refrains” traverse an entire ground of all twelve tones, yet remain distinctly root-centered on A-flat; the “invitations” are direct quotations from Ethiopian Catholic liturgy––an ongoing source of material and inspiration in many of Florentz’s works. The structural centerpiece is a 38-measure “toccata,” which is actually a dense recitative superimposed upon a relentlessly reiterated single chord (G-flat, A-flat, C, D, F, B-flat, B-natural, E) whose 41 reiterations depict the flagellation of Jesus; this centerpiece is, at once, a symbolic depiction of the Passion, and a deliberate “rupture in the unfolding of the work.” Although not so designated, this section could be greatly facilitated if the “41 flagellations” were entrusted to an assistant, whose role is mandatory in other places.

The music is in four main parts, corresponding, according to the composer, to the gestures of the sign of the Ethiopian cross. The first part (“Au nom. . . ,” mm. 1–81) commences with the first “refrain and invitation” and then proceeds in the manner of a recit en taille with parallel chords in the outer voices. The rising motion of these parallel chords gradually moves to the foreground, with sextuplet rhythm in the pedal. The recit returns en duo, with quintuplet rhythm in the outer parts, and this gives rise to a contrasting section with a new dominant-like sonority on B-natural that is clearly established and clearly broken in mm. 53–81.

The second part (“. . . du Pere,” mm. 82–144) features consonance and parallelism in all voices, followed by a cornet solo for the pedal (ideally pédale coupure), alternating with more animated passages. It is marked, variously, Très Large, Noble [et] lancinant, Lointain [et] mystérieux, etc., and culminates with the second “invitation,” which ends, conspicuously, on the very same chord with which the earlier dominant-like sonority was broken.

The third part (“. . . du Fils,” mm. 145–241) includes the Passion centerpiece, preceded by three different ideas: first, the third “refrain” (mm. 145–49); second, a manuals-only passage marked Sauvage, violent that is confined to the sonority of the half-diminished seventh (D, F, A-flat, C), only barely affected by the entrance of the pedal (mm. 150–60); and third, a quasi ostinato of third-inversion seventh-chords in the LH, with a tonally remote bass and an even more remote cantilena (en duo) in the RH, in which it gradually becomes apparent that each of these three elements is constricted to a set number of pitches (mm. 170–83).

The fourth part (“ . . .du Saint-Esprit,” mm. 242–373) begins with the most expressive, dissonant, slow, and expansive section of the work (mm. 242–70, which one might almost wish to single-out as a self-standing excerpt), followed by one of the most rhythmically obscure sections, in which the pedal line moves in six notes per half-bar, the left hand in four notes, and the right hand in five (mm. 271–311). This is followed by a section marked Un peu “reggae,” in which the texture eventually thins-out considerably and then proceeds in “open” sonorities of fourths and fifths. The final “refrain” and the third “invitation” conclude the section, and a quiet coda (“. . . un seul Dieu, Amen,” mm. 374–393) consists of the final “invitation” with various options for alternative sonorities.

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