When Anders Hillborg realised a commission from the Swedish National Music Promotion Foundation in 1983 with his bold new choral work, Mouyayoum, he received a reply saying that “no more of his work will ever be commissioned by them because the music he writes is unperformable.” This reaction must have hurt the Swedish composer deeply, as it was the first commission he received in his career. Lionel Sow and the singers of the NFM Choir certainly have a different opinion on the work. During their December concert, they will present Hillborg’s “impossible” work alongside Renaissance compositions by Orlando di Lasso and (probably) Josquin des Prez, as well as Jonathan Harvey’s eclectic work titled Forms of Emptiness.

Qui habitat in adjutorio altissimi attributed to Josquin – a setting in the form of a canon of Psalm 91 – has been preserved to our times only in German sources recorded after his death. The authorship of the Franco-Flemish master of polyphony is questioned, but not only because of the dubious reliability of the sources. Another argument is that the motet differs too much from Josquin’s usually much more complicated works. Here, constant repetitions and layers make it sound like a mantra, and listening to it, we lose the sense of the passage of time. Another Renaissance piece in the concert programme will be Orlando di Lasso’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Lasso wrote them for the private use of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, at whose court he worked for almost forty years until his death in 1594. While developing the ancient texts of prophecies, which in the Christian interpretation were to refer to the birth of Jesus Christ, the composer uses a musical language whose level of chromatism sometimes resembles the style of the mad Gesualdo da Venosa.

Qui habitat evoked only remote associations with Buddhism. The British Jonathan Harvey in Forms of Emptiness directly uses the Buddhist text of the Heart Sutra – both in Sanskrit and in translation – and next to it he also uses three poems of E.E. Cummings. His piece is written for three choirs singing in different tempos and keys, and musically refers to the styles of Palestrina and Olivier Messiaen.

Anders Hillborg’s Mouyayoum, which will close the concert, has no text at all, and the human voice is used here to achieve a sound effect resembling the manipulation of an electronic low-pass filter. Despite the original problems with the reception of the work, today it is one of the most famous works of the Swedish composer.