Dies irae

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation. Its first musical setting was a Gregorian chant in Dorian mode from the 13th century.

Fun fact! In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the self-flagellating monks are chanting the last few lines of the Dies irae sequence.

In the Renaissance, it was a standard practice to use Gregorian chants as the cantus firmus for contrapuntal compositions, and Dies irae was a popular starting point. Here is Missa pro defunctis: No. 4, Sequentia, Dies irae by Engarandus Juvenis from 1490. The Dies irae sequence is sung very slowly with contrapuntal lines superimposed on top.

In his book Renaissance Polyphony, John Fitch compares this kind of contrapuntally elaborated chant to ornate churches and furnishings:

The origin of Western polyphony lay in adorning plainchant with added voices, initially through extemporization and later in notation. A useful analogy is with the precious materials, creative ingenuity, and workmanship that went into countless sacred objects, from the buildings and their materials, clothed in marble, to silver and golden chalices, bejewelled and enamelled reliquaries, illuminated bibles, chant books, and books of polyphony. The comparison with an illuminated bible or book of hours is particularly apt: as the vessel of the divine Word, the time and expense lavished on it signalled the preciousness of what it holds. The same can be said of the highly trained performers who sang and adorned the plainchant, using the only musical instrument in divine creation, the human voice (p. 168). 

Here’s another example, Sequentia “Dies Irae Dies Illa” by Antoine Brumel from 1516.

Baroque composers continued to adapt Dies irae, though they were more inclined to set it in diatonic minor, because by then Dorian mode was considered to be old-fashioned and outdated. Here’s Dies iræ LWV 64/1 by Jean-Baptiste Lully from 1683.

Romantic composers used the Dies irae melody to signify darkness and witchcraft, as Hector Berlioz does in Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 from 1830.

Johannes Brahms used it for a more subtly magical effect in his Intermezzo in E-flat minor, Op. 118, No. 6 from 1893.

Sergei Rachmaninoff based a lot of music on Dies irae, like the opening of his Symphony No 1 from 1896.

You hear Dies irae quotes outside of the Western European canon, too, like in the main title theme from The Shining by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind (1980).

Danny Elfman quotes it in “Making Christmas” (1993).

Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez use the first four notes of Dies irae as the siren call in Frozen II, most prominently in “Into the Unknown” (2019).

And Cristobal Tapia de Veer uses it in the opening credits theme from the White Lotus (2021).

Below, I wrote out the beginning of the Gregorian chant, followed by some possible harmonization ideas of my own.

Now let me clear up a point of confusion. In classical music, “Dies irae” can refer to two different things: the Gregorian chant melody, and the text of a part of the Requiem mass. Many European composers wrote musical settings for the Requiem mass, and they did not necessarily use the Gregorian chant melodies. So, for example, the famous Dies irae sequence in Mozart’s Requiem uses the same text as the Gregorian chant, but Mozart sets it to completely different music. The same goes for the Requiems by Verdi, Brahms, and so on.

So here’s the question for my New School students: is Dies irae (the chant melody) a sample? WhoSampled.com seems to think so. Technically, a sample is a section of an audio recording, but people refer to quotes and interpolations as “samples” all the time. So when Rachmaninoff quotes Dies irae, is that the same creative act as Public Enemy sampling the Funky Drummer? Dan Charnas might agree that there’s a connection.

The breaks are a canon of shared holy sonic objects.

— Dan Charnas (@dancharnas) August 10, 2023

So let me ask a question that is often asked of sample-based hip-hop: can a composition based on Dies irae be said to be original? We will be figuring that out in class.