Commissioned by Spitalfields Festival. First performed by The Orlando Consort and the Joyful Company of Singers conducted by Peter Broadbent at Christ Church, Spitalfields on 22nd June 2006.

  • SATB
  • Alto, 2 Tenors, Baritone
  • 15 min
  • Petrarch, Anon., Arundel MS

Programme Note

Scattered Rhymes (‘Rime sparse’, as Petrarch describes his work in the first poem of the Canzionere sequence) represents an interlacing of two fourteenth-century texts which each toy with the ambiguities of intertwining sensuous and divine love. One stemming from England and one from the influences of Papal Avignon, these texts and this composition are designed to be framed by Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame (circa 1364), both contemporaneously and geographically. The movements can be performed separately, intertwined with movements from the Machaut mass, or performed continuously as a fifteen-minute work.

The journey upon which Petrarch (1304 – 1374) takes his reader in the Canzionere is, on one level, an obsessive, fifty-year love story concocted from poems and diary-like prose (he later went back and removed the latter from the manuscript, leaving only the poetry). Yet, looked at in another way it is a sort of bildungsroman, or developmental biography (not too dissimilar to St Augustine’s Confessionum), in which we see his life and thoughts develop and, concurrently, the maturing of the style in which these events are described.

In 1327, Petrarch’s eyes fell upon Laura, a beautiful young woman in the congregation of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon, whom some scholars, perhaps somewhat too eagerly, believe to be Laura de Noves, a direct ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. This is where Petrarch’s story and this composition begin. From the complete Canzionere, I have chosen three poems which highlight his lifelong obsessision with this woman whome he knew only by sight; these are sung by the four soloists. I have paired each of his sonnets with a stanza from an anonymous poem, found in a fourteenth century collation of English love songs (held in the British Library since 1831), whose author, a kindred spirit, seems to comment upon Petrarch’s plight; his words are sung by the main chorus here.

Scattered Rhymes begins with the author confused and in awe of Laura’s beauty; she is first presented in the guise of a celestial being brought to earth by God, an event which seems to prompt Petrarch’s English counterpart to comment that ‘Beauty in heaven afar laughed from her joyous star’. Decades later, in Part II, the pain of Petrarch’s unrequited love renders him ‘one soul in two bodies’, while across the Channel, the Englishman’s heart is similarly ‘not great enough’ for his desire. Finally, in Part III, we hear Petrarch toward the end of his life and many years after Laura’s death, his love has seemingly beatifyed her (or has she returned to her celestial origins?); is it Mary or Laura in the summer breeze (l’aura, Petrarch puns) whom ‘Heaven reveals’? Back in England, the anonymous author, dreaming of his own sensual encounter, too finds himself transported ‘to heaven among the rest’.

Musically, Scattered Rhymes is built up entirely from tiny fragments found in the Machaut mass: peculiarly rich ‘scrunches’ and false relations mixed with open fifths, fourths and syncopated, accented plainchant-like motifs. Adopting a technique I first used in a composition called I sleep, but my heart waketh, the perpetually shifting patterns heard here form a surface dormancy underneath which the harmonic and textural development takes place throughout the work. Petrarch’s own ostinato of obsession is recreated by dint of repeated rhythmic cells.

For centuries, composers such as Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schubert and Schoenberg have all found inspiration in Petrarch’s writings, ‘translating’ his verse musically. Yet Machaut, a composer whose influence on the entire development of Western music is impossible to overstiamte and a near-exact contemporary of Petrarch’s, was more famous in his day as a man of letters. The English language today serves as a legacy to both fourteenth century poets, as it remains a hotly debated topic as to which of them was the greatest influence upon Chaucer’s writings.

Spending much of his life mixing sacred and secular sources in his literary and musical works, it is a pleasant (and not too fanciful) thought to think of Machaut meeting Petrarch and the anonymous English poet at some point on their various travels. Perhaps, as they are found here, they exchanged ideas and ‘scattered’ their rhymes.

I am very grateful to Beatrice Sica for her invaluable assistance in preparing the text for the score.

Tarik O’Regan
May, 2006

Media

Scattered Rhymes: Scattered Rhymes: I. Part I
Scattered Rhymes: Scattered Rhymes: II. Part II
Scattered Rhymes: Scattered Rhymes: III. Part III

Reviews

"Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes (2006), the biggest piece in the whole evening and the best, pitted a solo quartet singing Petrarch against the other singers intoning 14th century English love poetry. The textures were often dense and fragmentary, but I loved the richness of the sounds and the strong musical personality I had missed in the previous pieces. It wasn’t comfortable listening at times, but had substance and a deep exploration of the choral medium. The stillness of the second section gave way to a riotous finale which built up a real momentum over accented syllabic recitation, one of the few really fast passages in the whole evening, and one that brought a huge smile to Nicholas Mulroy’s face in the final bars."

Bernard Hughes, The Arts Desk
16th May 2024
'one of the finest choral works to have emerged in the last ten years.
Clive Paget, Limelight Magazine
8th October 2014
…Scattered Rhymes takes its lyrics from two fourteenth-century poems of Petrarch, both dealing with the poet’s unrequited love for a young woman but from very different perspectives: one more romantic and sensual, the other endowing the object of his obsession with seemingly celestial qualities. In this piece O’Regan takes small musical ideas directly from Machaut’s Mass and incorporates them into his own work in a variety of ways, some more obvious than others, using the four-voice Orlando Consort and the larger Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir alternately. The result is both brightly energetic and passionately intense, and it illustrates perhaps more brilliantly than any other musical work the connections between the Ars Nova movement and the post-tonal twentieth century; it also complements beautifully the dark, vinegary sound of the Machaut Mass setting….
Rick Anderson, Project Muse
1st December 2009
...O'Regan's music bridged two eras magnificently, its cross-rhythms, repetitive ostinatos and dense, atmospheric harmonies coalescing into a brilliantly conceived meeting of two eras, seven centuries apart.
Michael Huebner, The Birmingham News (Alabama)
9th February 2009
[Scattered Rhymes] was originally written as a companion piece for Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, pairs a chorus with a determinedly virtuoso vocal quartet, in a way that combines something of the sparkle of the sun on the sea with the strong surge of the currents that can flow below.
Michael Dervan, The Irish Times
20th May 2008
...complex and challenging Scattered Rhymes by the young British composer Tarik O'Regan. Intertwining an eclectic selection of sources - Petrarch and an anonymous 14th-century English poet for the texts and fragments of a mass by Guillaume de Machaut, the most influential composer of the Middle Ages - O'Regan wove the most magical and beguiling spell with the voices, delicately overlapping and layering the vocal lines of the consort quartet and choir, and building them up to produce the most brilliant and stunning sound: in particular the pulsing effect he created, almost like an echo in stereo
Susan Nickalls, Scotsman
9th May 2007
The text and inspiration for Scattered Rhymes comes from the fourteenth-century; the poetry of Petrarch and an anonymous contemporary Englishman and Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame. The result is a richly textured work in which medieval fuses with modern in an accomplished performance.
Rowena Smith, The Herald
8th May 2007
Stunning! Between the Mass movements came not only Gregorian chants, smoothly delivered by Broadbent’s choir, but a magnificent Spitalfields commission, Scattered Rhymes, devised by Tarik O’Regan as a companion to the Machaut. Motifs and chord clashes from the Mass gave him his seedbed; two 14th-century texts about human and divine love by Petrarch and Anonymous gave him his words. And off he went, pitching both vocal groups into a multi-plane display of soaring lines and rocking rhythms, merging the 14th and 21st centuries in the friendliest embrace. O’Regan’s gift for lyric flight seems boundless. You might have to reach back to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, or even Tallis, to find another British vocal work so exultant.
Geoff Brown, The Times (London)
26th June 2006

Discography

Scattered Rhymes

Scattered Rhymes
  • Label
    Harmonia Mundi USA
  • Catalogue Number
    HMU 807469
  • Conductor
    Paul Hillier
  • Ensemble
    Orlando Consort / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
  • Released
    1st April 2008

More Info