What kinds of things is this student looking for?

 

Quotation of Victimae Paschali in Rutter's Requiem?

 

or

 

Heinrich Isaac's Choralis Constantinus, which has over 400 motets for the Proper - all based on the corresponding chant?

Check out books by Anthony Ruff and Edward Schaefer.

 

Charpentier Requiem (Dies Iræ), Liszt Via Crucis, and Heinrich Isaac communion motets (e.g. “Domus mea”) are off-the-beaten-path pieces that I have encountered that quote chant melodies.

There must be 1000s of examples - anything with the Dies Irae motif for example. Here's a brilliant one: the opening to the Credo in J.S. Bach's B Minor Mass.

 

 

The Verdi Te Deum starts with a chant.  Also the Holst "Hymn of Jesus" quotes both Vexilla regis and Pange lingua right at the beginning, first in the orchestra, then the voices.

 

Bill Weinert

Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna features a Cantus Firmus in the second movement. Also, I need to reiterate.... DIES IRAE!!!!! You could do a dissertation on that alone!

Jackson Berkey's "Arma lucis" quotes a Gregorian chant throughout 

Hi, Tim.  My first suggestion is that your student wait a bit until he or she has completed the music history classes that are required.  This isn't an especially esoteric issue, but it's definitely a complex one, since composers have been using or basing their music on borrowed chants since the very first examples of organum appeared in the 9th century through the present day, and most students are simply not yet familiar with the medieval, late medieval, early and later renaissance repertoires in which this continued to be a standard composition practice (leavened at times, of course, by the use of pop songs like "L'homme armé").

 

The 15th century is an especially fruitful era, since it saw the transition from literal quotation from chants (sometimes complete chants, but just as often mere portions of chants, as in DuFay's "Nuper rosarum flores"), into the new equal-voiced imitative style of the Franco-Flemish composers who used their chant quotations in all voices.  And even Monteverdi (in the "Sonata sopra Sancta Maria" from the 1610 Vespers) has the choirboys singing the pure chant melody while his instrumentalists weave a marvelous tapestry around them.  Equally interesting is that both Schútz and Bach dropped the use of the traditional chant and composed their own Evangelist melodies, even though both of them were certainly familiar with the traditional chant.

 

It sounds as if he (or you) is more interested in 20th century use rather than historical use, and of course that in itself could be a very interesting study, but rather limited.  It's an option long available to any composers who managed to stay awake in their music history classes!

For an in depth study of the history of this technique see Thomas Forrest Kelly, Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

 

You should be able to find this book in your college library or through ILL.

 

You can also find this book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Plainsong-Polyphony-Cambridge-Performance-Practice/dp/0521401607/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240083438&sr=1-2#

 Epithalame from Daniel-Lesur's Cantiques. 

Veni sponsa Christi

 

 

Another well known and easy example is the 4 part Ave Maria attributed to Victoria.

Durufle's Four Motets based on Gregorian Chants are the first pieces that come to mind... 

Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di prigionia quotes extensively and very creatively from the Dies irae chant in vocal and instrumental parts.  This 3-mov't work is partially composed in 12-tone technique (based on a row quite different in character from those of the more familiar Schoenberg or Webern choral works). His use of chant is a further means of unifying the work and adds significantly to the work's meaning as this was his response to the imposition of the racial laws of Hitler as proclaimed by Mussolini in 1938.