puer natus est

This piece is, at its opening, loosely based on the Léonin (12th century) introit for the same text (“Puer Nat’s est”). The music imagines entering church on Christmas morning, yet also greeting others while doing so. The piece opens very free in tempo and varies in texture through dialogue between different groups of voices and soloists. The music switches between tonal and atonal harmony, beginning mostly hexachordal and moving through different modal variants, recalling the harmony of the original fragment.
puer natus est is dedicated to Huw Morgan and the Ripieno choir and was written to be performed at their Twelfth Night concert in January 2020.