Abstract
Transiens is a polychoral triptych for twenty-five voice-parts and cantus firmus, lasting some twenty-five minutes. Its source is the canonic setting of the Apostles’ Creed, Jesus autem transiens / Credo in Deum, added by Robert Wylkynson (in charge of the choir at Eton from 1500 to 1515) to the final index-page of the Eton Choirbook, read from a facsimile supplied by the University of Oxford’s Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music with The Song Company in 2019. Half a page of Wylkynson’s music expands here into a seventy-page score of twenty-five staves to the page, and almost the whole work is generated from that half-page by canonic and other contrapuntal devices, making it a non-linear fractal interpretation of the original canon. The thirteen voices of the source are joined by twelve more, after the twenty-four elders singing a new song in the Book of Revelation. The only material from outside the canon is a direct quotation of the hymn fragment sung by the old man in Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, for which Transiens was written as a companion piece. The published score is the notated research output: it documents how a thirteen-voice canon was expanded to twenty-five, and makes the method available for performance and for study.