Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD4 - The Polyphonic Motet from Ars Antiqua t

ARS ANTIQUA Three genres dominated the polyphonic production of the Notre Dame School: florid organum, the conductus (an original non-liturgical composition in Latin verse in which none of the parts is derived from the Gregorian repertory), and the motet. Derived in the early thirteenth century from the organum clausula (a kind of ‘coda’/summing-up composed in the manner of the conductus), during the following centuries it was to acquire a position of the greatest importance, becoming the predominant centre of interest to virtually all composers. Retrospectively named the Ars Antiqua by the theorists of the Ars Nova which succeeded it, the music of the thirteenth century became the theatre of an increasing ‘complexification’ of polyphony and of its rhythmic components. It reached its peak at the turn of the fourteenth century with the motets of Pierre de la Croix, active between 1270 and 1300. The music of the Ars Antiqua still holds many mysteries for us. For at the beginning of the fourteenth century came a new system of notation that sought to grant even greater freedom to the vox organalis by bringing rhythmic variety and a faster tempo. From a purely technical point of view the way to the Ars Nova was being paved, which occurred, paradoxically, through a systematisation of rhythmic structure. The tenor had been the first to be affected by the process of isorhythm, consisting in the perpetual repetition of a rhythm; the rhythms became more complex, isorhythm extended to the other voices, sometimes leading to panisorhythm (the same rhythm for all the parts), a kind of ‘total programming’ of the rhythm of an entire piece. This advanced cerebral form of composition is quite evident in certain motets, whose hocket effects, cultivated by the trouvères, were to be taken up by the composers and theorists of the Ars Nova. ENGLAND IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY Campanis cum cymbalis / Honoremus Dominam A short motet celebrating the jubilant power of music in the praise of God; the second text honours the Virgin Mary. The lower voices evoke the ringing of bells and the concluding chord unusually contains a full major triad. Worldes blisse have good day / Benedicamus Domino This song has survived on the flyleaf of an early fourteenth-century manuscript – a typical operation of chance in preserving an example of medieval song. On the same flyleaf are a French motet and some wordless three-part pieces. The song is technically a motet in which the lower, textless part is an isorhythmic working of part of a plainsong ‘Benedicamus’ (this is here sung first as a solo chant). Valde mane diluculo This motet survives in the binding of a manuscript at Tours. Frank Ll Harrison writes: ‘It is an intriguing mystery how the French binders of a fifteenth-century manuscript of the works of Terence came to fix inside the binding some parchment leaves with the fourteenth-century motets of English origin. That the motets are English is established by style, and the facts that one of them is previously known from an English source and that another has a Tenor part indicated “Wynter”, obviously the title of an English song. Part of a possible explanation may lie in an interest in things English on the part of the clergy who owned the main manuscript; for on two of its inside pages are notes in French on some matters concerning the history of England. The feature in a motet of having voices with the same word or words, as in this piece, is also one that is particularly English.’ Gaude Virgo Mater Christi A three-voice setting of the third and final strophe of the sequence ‘Celum Deus inclinavit’. The lowest voice is based on a corresponding plainsong melody. – P. Hi. ARS NOVA & PRE-RENAISSANCE We will come back to this period in detail in our discussion of the Messe de Nostre Dame of Guillaume de Machaut. A century after the latter work, it is reasonable to surmise that Guillaume Dufay wrote his final and most expansive setting of Ave Regina celorum with his own end in mind. The motet had been composed by the mid-1460s (at which time Dufay would have been much the same age as Machaut when he wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame), but the addition to the standard text of Dufay’s personal invocations to the Virgin indicates that the inspiration that lay behind it was concern for his soul at the time of his death. Moreover, Dufay’s will stipulated that the motet should be sung by men and choirboys at his bedside at the precisemoment of his death (which occurred on 27 November 1474 in Cambrai). In the event it proved impossible to assemble the singers in time, and the requested performance took place the following day. John Dunstable was regarded by contemporary commentators as the prime mover towards the new style exemplified by Dufay. Dunstable’s large-scale Salve scema sanctitatis is typical of the old-fashioned formal rigour of the isorhythmic motet – all four voices are pre-determined rhythmically, and the piece is divided into three sections in the proportions 3:2:1 – yet the two uppermost voices are dominated by the new melodic grace. Its text, a heavily alliterative poem about the life of St Catherine, has been divided between the two upper voices, while the tenor repeats a fragment of the respond Virgo flagellatur, from the Office for her feast day. – G. C. FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH MUSIC The predominance of the ‘contenance angloise’ lasted only a generation or two. According to the Flemish theorist Tinctoris, writing around the year 1470, whereas Dunstable had been the fount and origin of the new music (of Dufay, Binchois, and later Ockeghem), the English now ‘continue to use one and the same style of composition, which shows a wretched poverty of invention’. In John Plummer’s Anna Mater (referring to Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary), we find an early example of the Votive Antiphon which became such a favourite with English composers towards the turn of the century. While its canonic-style entries over a sustained bass note recall the manner and technique of certain pieces from the Old Hall Manuscript, imitation plays a more structural role, just as it was beginning to do on the continent. As the most important figure in English music between Dunstable and the Eton composers, John Plummer has been rather overlooked. His music bears a family resemblance to some of the carol music, but it is possible to detect a pre-echo of the Eton Choirbook style in the way Plummer treats the blossoming of sonority as he brings in the ‘tutti’ after a duet passage. Plummer was the first official Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal (appointed in 1444) and later worked at St George’s Chapel, Windsor – just across the river from Eton. – P. Hi. RENAISSANCE The motet and the religious repertory at the Renaissance In the second half of the 15th century Iohannes Tinctoris established a hierarchy of musical genres according to the texts they used. At the top of what he calls the cantus (chant, composition) he placed the Mass and immediately below it the compositions on other sacred texts. The cantilena, or secular song came third. Tinctoris went on to qualify this three-part division of the cantus as as magnus, mediocris and parvus (i.e. great, medium and small). Tinctoris qualified as cantus mediocris all religious music that was not concerned with the Ordinary of the Mass and designated all of these works by the term ‘motet’. The word poses a problem, however, when it is applied to all fifteenth- and sixteenth-century compositions based on a sacred text. The manuscripts and printed editions often make a distinction between strictly liturgical compositions and those of a more general religious character, whether they were occasionally included in the liturgy or not. A collection of motets generally comprised a heterogeneous mixture of compositions on texts of a varied nature: whole or parts of psalms, antiphons, prayers in honour of the saints, etc. The title pages were couched in general terms: Sacrae cantiones (or Cantiones sacrae) quae vulgo motetta vocant (Sacred chants commonly called motets). As time went on, the motet tended more and more to liberate itself from all strict predetermined forms. In the course of the creative process the composer himself conceived every aspect of the complete work. The motets composed by Josquin Desprez on texts from the Psalms occupy a crucial position in this phenomenon of emancipation because they mark the beginning of an important body of work produced throughout the sixteenth century. In his Salve Regina, a motet in honour of the Virgin Mary, Josquin quotes in paraphrase the Gregorian plainsong melody of this Marian hymn. In a continuous imitative counterpoint he creates a splendid texture of four parts which presents the equivalent of captivating variations on the chant. The same serene mood reigns in Congregati sunt, the only surviving motet by Clément Janequin, taken from an Italian collection published in Ferrara in 1538. In spite of the references in the text to enemies and battle, Janequin does not allow himself to be seduced by the temptations of pictorialism as he had so effectively done in the celebrated chanson La Bataille. None the less, the evolution towards the freely invented motet had been particularly inspired by the tendency to express the contents of the text in musical terms. Josquin especially had paved the way to a form of music that is conceived as an extension of the words. With him the text was to become more and more the new thread of the musical argument. His art marks the final and definitive irruption of humanism in music, a form of music conceived on a human scale, one in which the listener feels himself immediately involved, one that ‘speaks’ to us. With language, with the word as a springboard, it addresses us directly. While Lassus, at the court of Munich, was becoming increasingly influenced by the severity and the austerity of the Counter- Reformation, in England there were radical reforms taking place both in the style and the role of music, which was even more directly under the influence of the religious tendencies than on the continent. The composer who was most affected by the fluctuations of the religious revolutions and counter-revolutions was undoubtedly Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85), whose life encompassed four reigns: Henry VIII, who made the official break with the Church of Rome; Edward VI, under whom the reformers were given free rein; Mary Tudor, the intransigent Catholic Queen who restored submission to Rome; and Elizabeth I, under whom Anglicanism definitively became the official religion of the land. William Byrd (1543-1623), a pupil of Tallis, probably felt the religious conflicts even more keenly, because, although a convinced Catholic, he remained in England where he and his family were frequently prosecuted for recusancy. He remained in favour with the Queen, however, and was permitted to publish his first Latin motets, a selection of which had been issued in 1575 together with several works by Tallis in a collection dedicated to the Queen. In the motet Peccantem me quotidie he young Byrd proves himself to be an accomplished master of the learned techniques of imitative counterpoint, without, however, making an explicit effort at insistent expression of the content of the text. ‘Modernism’ in the motet: Hassler and Gesualdo Though not as frequently as the madrigal, the motet became from time to time an area of experimentation for the latest tendencies, especially those connected with the intense relationship between music and words. Hans Leo Hassler, the composer of the rather traditional Mass ‘Dixit Maria’, also wrote a highly chromatic motet in which he consciously breaks away from the customarily balanced diatonic harmonic design. It is obvious that this is dictated by the text of the psalm, Ad ominum cum tribularer, which speaks of the tribulation (cum tribularer) of the faithful and of the ‘deceitful tongue’ (lingua dolosa) – hence this ‘perturbed’ and ‘deceitful’ music. While the art of chromaticism is the exception with Hassler, the Neapolitan composer and murderer of his wife and her lover, Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1611), immersed himself unrestrainedly in an extravagantly chromatic idiom. This should not, however, be understood as the beginning of a new epoch (the Baroque), but rather as the end of the preceding one (the Renaissance). It is significant that Gesualdo, in spite of his unstable harmonic style, persisted in the polyphonic tradition and never wrote any monodies. In his responds for Holy Saturday such as Ecce quomodo moritur justus and his motets like Tribulationem et dolorem there is a somewhat exalted, but always fascinating and extravagant ‘fin de siècle’ spirit.