Volume 01
Ernst Widmer - Diálogo do Anjo com as três Mulheres (Officium Sepulchri)

Short Review

“Officium Sepulchri” (Dialogue between the Angel and the Three Women) was especially composed for the concert of the 1966 Holy Week event which gave origin to the Group of Composers from Bahia.

An instrumentation of woodwind (1/1/1/1), brass (2/2/2/1) and percussion (timpani, bass drum, shell bells and two sirens) constitutes the musical environment of the short text “De antiquis ecclesiae ritis”, in which an angel announces Jesus’ resurrection to the three women who came to visit the sepulcher: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Starting with the observation that the program implicit in the piece is both suggestion and evocation, Ilza Nogueira’s analysis focuses the work in its harmonic and motivic context, tracing a parallel with Debussy’s “La Catedral Engloutie”. Through concepts and tools from Allen Forte’s Pitch-class Set Theory, the author demonstrates a compositional process that uses a highly traditional harmonic context – diatony – dealing with it however, from a non-traditional perspective: as a collection and not as an order of pitch classes.