Veni dilectissime, performance materials + license

Quick summary

• Forces: 2-part song for upper, lower, and/or mixed voices
• Duration: variable
• Difficulty: easy
• Text: 'naughty' 11th-century lyric from the Cambridge Songs manuscript
• Language: Latin
• Date of composition: 2024

Performance licenses are valid for unlimited performances and rehearsals by the same ensemble. Please choose the appropriate license for your choir size.

Detailed info

Veni dilectissime (which could be loosely translated as: ‘Come Here, Sexy!’) is a Latin song from an 11th-century songbook, copied in the Rhineland and now in Cambridge University library. This naughty goliardic lyric apparently caused so much offence in the middle ages that a do-gooder scribe actually splodged it out of the manuscript!

Thankfully, modern scholarship and UV technology have brought at least some of it back, and experts on Latin poetry have proposed plausible words to fill in the blanks. No melody survives, but the words have such a common rhythm that it’s easy enough to patch together bits of existing medieval melodies in order to sing them in a medieval-ish way.

This playful and simple arrangement, with overlapping lines (+ optional harmonies) traded between two groups of voices, is easy, fun, and very fast to learn. It could work as either a warm-up or short concert piece. Each part may be sung by upper voices, lower voices, and/or mixed voices in octaves; the flexibility of forces is intended to allows for a broad range of theatrical and/or musical interpretations!