I first heard the music of Vicente Lusitano in 2020, which marked the beginning of one of the driest three-year periods in California’s history. The rain and snow returned three years later with a vengeance, and we rejoiced, even as we quietly feared it was too much all at once for the parched earth to absorb.

 

Vicente Lusitano’s radiant vocal music sounds like something beamed in from a distant time and place, which, in a sense, it is. The African-Portuguese composer lived in 16th-Century Europe, where he wrote motets and music theory treatises before falling into obscurity for roughly 400 years. The recent ripple of attention around Lusitano reminds me of the anomalous wetness we enjoyed in 2023. I am glad to see more performances and recordings of his music, yet I sense the brief buzz surrounding the stunning music of this composer may already be receding.

 

For my part, I seem unable to let go of my fascination with Lusitano’s music, which has seeped into my most recent compositions in different and unexpected ways. Sun Left takes its title from the first stanza of one of Lusitano’s only surviving madrigals, Allor che ignuda: “Now that the earth is stripped of plants and flowers because the sun has left us . . .” Sun Left uses fragments of this madrigal as its initial thematic material. You’ll hear these fragments first as discreet, aphoristic gestures that gradually coalesce into more sustained phrases. The second act of Sun Left is a long and continuous descending gesture, inspired by another Lusitano composition: his bewitchingly chromatic motet, Heu me Domine.