Laudamus Te

'Laudamus Te' is a five movement work for chamber orchestra and two soprano soloists. Based on both Biblical texts and more modern writings, the work presents five different perspectives on the relationship between humanity and the Divine. The texts revolve around themes of humility, love, charity, and praise. Drawing on Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian texts, the work brings these disparate sources together through an emphasis on a unifying faith and similarity of sentiment that transcends the divides of language, time, and space. The work contrasts the narrative Latin texts with more reflective French and Spanish texts in the first four movements. The narrative and often turbulent quality of the text for movements one and three is reflected through frequent shifts of meter, texture, and character, while the reflective nature of the texts for movements two and four is represented through the more static use of meter and texture. While the first and third movements heavily rely on asymmetrical meters, the second movement favors a contrapuntal setting in common time while the fourth places more emphasis on vertical expressions of the harmonic content. The fifth movement aims to find common ground between the two characters, the traditional Biblical texts and the more modern writings as represented by the soloists. In this final movement, both the Biblical text and the Italian text converge on a reflective tone that is no longer one of introspection or of turbulent narration but rather one of public praise. Not only does the fifth movement tie together the two soloists and the text sources, but it also moves to symbolically include the larger community in the repetition of the final text, bringing the orchestra and soloists together in a unified statement: we praise you.