for guitar quartet.


I) Hodie Christus Natus Est
II) Veni, Veni Emmanuel

Quite a while ago I heard on the Vatican Radio a Christmas Gregorian chant that impressed me so much that I kept myself for years imagining that I had someday to make a transformed version of mine of it. In 2014, my colleague and friend Paulo Lopes suggested to me that I should write something for the youth choir he conducted, and I then recovered that old idea, composing two Christmas carols in Latin based on Gregorian chants, naturally including that special one that I had heard times ago.
The first carol in this collection uses the melody of medieval origin “Hodie Christus Natus Est”, “Today Christ is Born”, collected in a Roman antiphonary from the 19th century. The second carol ended up being exactly that one that had captivated me so much years ago, “Veni, Veni Emmanuel”, “Come, Come, Emmanuel”, a quite famous melody from the 15th century, with even older lyrics from the 12th century.
In 2025, Paulo once again gave me the idea that those carols could also work for a guitar ensemble, and I then recreated them for a guitar quartet. But it wasn't a direct transcription, it was more like a “transcreation” so to speak. In the first piece, the simple lines of the Gregorian chant and the new harsh harmonization I had originally proposed for it got transformed into tiny bell-like campanella-style notes, distributed to the musicians in hockets, in something resembling the hypnotized cast from Werner Herzog's film “Heart of Glass”. The second carol stayed closer to my version for choir, preserving the asymmetric rhythms and the dissonant harmonization I had applied to the original Gregorian chant but making clearer certain emulations of sleigh bells, thanks to the guitar's usual percussive timbre.

score:

recording:

Violões: Flávio Apro (Projeto Violão em Foco - UEM)