L'Homme Arme (cantus firmus tradition)

A famous French secular melody from the mid-15th century — its text concerns 'the armed man' — which became the most widely used cantus firmus in the history of Western music, the basis for over 40 polyphonic Mass settings by composers including Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Palestrina. Rzewski's Piano Sonata (1991) uses the melody as the basis for 27 variations in its final movement, placing his radical political aesthetic and post-tonal language in dialogue with this 500-year-old tradition of transformation and elaboration.

In Rzewski's Sonata, the 'armed man' theme carries its historical weight: it is a melody about conflict and warfare, transformed by countless generations of composers, now renewed in a 20th-century political context. Allow the melody to emerge and recede through the variations; the listener should sense its presence even when it is most deeply concealed.