New Editions Up

Two new motets on the other page. A couple of items from Whitsunday. Rather late for this year, I'm afraid, but the beauty of the liturgical cycle is that it's just that!

New Initiative: Editions of Renaissance Polyphony

I've given some thought to what the purpose of this blog is, now that I'm not leading a chant schola, and today I'm launching a new initiative: to publish free editions of sacred music designed for liturgical use. I intend to post music I have used in the context of worship, beginning with a couple of mass settings I edited while working at Holy Innocents'. Check out the new tab at the top of the page. Several other works have already been edited and will be posted soon, so please check back often.

All of these will also be available through CPDL. In keeping with the esoteric streak of this blog and to further the informing mission of projects like CPDL, I will avoid publishing music which already have widely available online editions and will focus on masses and motets that are beautiful but neglected. Enjoy!

Commentary on Renaissance music theory, musicology, and chant will continue as before.

A Font of Wisdom III: Clefs, Clashes, and Criticism

I have finally finished Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the links between liturgy, plainsong, and early English polyphony. In fact, the book would be most useful simply as a reference on the repertoire, and remains surprisingly useful in that regard even 54 years after its publication.

I have already written on its comprehensiveness and charm in the previous two posts; now I would like to share a few more observations.

First, I was surprised to come across the material on performing pitch and transposition. Anyone who follows scholarship on performance practice knows that this is one of the principal problems encountered in Renaissance music.

Since it's such a "hot" topic and has such importance for performance of the music of the church, I intend to write a longer guide on the question from the practical angle. Briefly, Renaissance polyphony was notated almost exclusively in two sets of clefs. In a four-part texture these would be either (from the top down): Treble, Mezzo-soprano, Alto, Baritone; or Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass. Why was this the case? Plainchant, as usual, provides the answer. Early polyphony was composed on a plainsong tenor, sung slowly in the third voice (which thus came to be called the tenor). Some melodies, particularly in modes 5 and 7 (range roughly F–f or G–g), cannot be notated on a staff with a tenor clef without ledger lines, which were usually to be avoided. So scribes would simply use an alto clef, and to maintain the normal disposition of voices, the other parts would be moved one clef higher as well.

Where this collides with our modern rationalism is in the performance pitch. Anyone who has ever directed a performance of Gregorian chant, for the mass say, has noticed that the notated "pitch" is not a hard and fast thing. In your typical mode 5 gradual, it would be prudent to sing with a final on D rather than the written F, unless your schola consists entirely of high tenors.

This same flexibility applied to polyphony. As I've hinted, pieces in the odd-numbered modes are generally written in the high clefs, and pieces in the even-numbered modes are written in the low clefs. Does this mean that different forces were required to sing music in the two systems? No. Music in the high clefs was regularly transposed down, probably about a fourth, but perhaps a little more or less.

Why is this controversial? In terms of scholarship it's a settled question, but it is regularly ignored by performing groups: even some justifiably famous and wonderful choirs. The reason is that the modern soprano voice was almost never used in the Renaissance, with the exception of English polyphony, which often includes treble parts on top of the usual continental "ATTB" disposition. In order to accommodate groups heavy with sopranos, the rules governing the high clefs are routinely circumvented.

Of course this has some negative practical consequences. Namely that the "Alto part" is generally thus written in an extremely uncomfortable range: going too low for women and too high for men. Down a fourth it's usually perfect for a high tenor. The general solution is to combine men and women on this part, but then nobody feels comfortable. And also the bass parts are too high, often drifting to middle C or higher. This usually throws the entire balance off.

To get back to my point, I found that Prof. Harrison had encountered this question and answered it correctly in his book. I had previously been under the mistaken impression that this was a more recent discovery of musicology, but he mentions it in passing as a settled question, citing Arthur Mendel. Shame on me for not knowing that:

…The transposition of the second mode down a fifth to G…arose in polyphony from the need to accommodate the range of the mode to the range of the tenor voice. The reverse of this method of adjusting mode to range was also used, by keeping the normal pitch of the mode in the writing of the music, thus setting the voices at a pitch which required downward transposition in performance.

On another theoretical matter, false relations, he offers a neat explanation again relying on the peculiarities of plainsong interacting with the rules of counterpoint. Very clear-headed thinking again:

The composers of the Eton music followed a long-established practice when they set the lowest part of a piece with a constant B flat and one or more of the upper parts with a more or less constant B natural. This flattening of the B below C on the second space of the bass clef with almost complete consistency, whatever the mode, gave rise to the idiom of 'false relation'. The setting of a bass part under a tenor singing F, for example, called for a B flat as one of the possible notes, and if the upper parts were in a mode which normally used B natural, a situation arose in which a false relation could become an established idiom… The effect was obviously enjoyed for its own sake, and became accepted in other contexts. 

The last thing I want to highlight about the book is its refreshing and unapologetic æsthetic judgment. The reason much current musicology is dry and unreadable, apart from jargon and ridiculous academic trends, is that it shies away from the principal goal of criticism, which is to make judgments about the success of artistic endeavors in achieving beauty. This means making positive statements:

The Eton music, like the chapel for which it was created, is a monument to the art and craftsmanship of many minds united in the object of carrying out the founder's vision of perpetual devotion. From its study and performance there emerge some distinct impressions of the musical personalities among the composers who contributed most significantly to the expression of that devotion. Browne's technical command, the deeply penetrating quality of his imagination, and his a for strikingly dramatic expression place him among the greatest composers of his age, while Lambe's wise and experienced mastery is capable of reaching heights both of emotion and technique. Davy excels in sure and rapid craftsmanshio and in the joyful exuberance of its use, and Cornysh in the versatility of a talent which, though not remarkable for depth or consistency, ranges from the sensuous warmth of the Salve regina to the flamboyance of the Stabat mater and the simplicity of the Ave Maria mater Dei. Wylkynson can be admired for his more than respectable competence as a well-schooled informator-composer, and his high level of ability is shared by most of those whose attainments can be judged only from one or two examples of their work.

And negative:

Tallis's antiphon Salve intemerata, the source of his derived Mass with the same title, was written on an original tenor. It is not a successful work, for the style of the polyphony falls awkwardly between differentiation and integration, lacking the linear and rhythmic vitality of the earlier style and the logic and coherence of the later, while the rhythm sags at intermediate cadences through lack of overlapping phrases, and the themes are uneven in interest.

Ouch! When musicology is worthwhile, it is precisely because it does not forget that the purpose of all music is beauty, both sensual and conceptual, and that composers of the past sometimes failed in this, and sometimes succeeded.

A Font of Wisdom II: On the charm of English Polyphony

As I mentioned in the preceding post, I'm currently captivated by Frank Ll. Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain. Having had the extreme good fortune to sing a Sheppard mass at last Sunday's mass at St Mary's and a Robert White motet at last night's Pontifical Mass at Holy Innocents, I'm struck again by the purity and beauty of this music. It's hard to place what the relatively obscure composers of the pre-Tallis generation share, but I think Prof. Harrison gets it right:

The fundamental principle of late medieval polyphony was differentiation of melody, rhythm and phrasing; this gave an effect of great exuberance and vitality to the full sections, in which the parts surrounded the tenor with patterns of continuously changing melody, of cross-rhythm and of overlapping phrases. The ideas of thematic development, imitation and repetition were minor elements in the making of these patterns, the melodies being formed by a process of continuous renewal and variety. Imitation, when present, was hidden within and incidental to the complex of sound, being concerned with brief and purely decorative figures, and sequence was likewise used only for short and ornamental parts of a phrase. The solo sections were written as passages of vocal chamber music for the more expert singers, in which overt imitation between the parts, which was more frequent in them than in the full choral sections, was used as an additional method of weaving a polyphonic texture. This medieval aesthetic of polyphony, which was bound up with the notion of polyphony as an adornment of the ritual plainsong, persisted in some degree in English choral music until the Reformation, and while it could be modified by the elements of repetition and correspondence in their various forms, the nature of the musical texture was such that it could not be basically changed until the ritual plainsong was abandoned, or used in dismembered units as a source of material for imitative entries.

What does it say about you when this passage gets you really excited?

I think it's true that the absolute commitment to plainchant pervaded the entire musical culture (I want to expand on that in a future post). But we can hear that ethos even in a work not based on a plainchant, as in Sheppard's Plainsong Mass for a Mean: it manifests itself as pan-consonance. Not only does the mass lack the carefully prepared and resolved suspensions of the Roman school, there are no dissonances at all except at final cadences. We feel none of the tension and release of a Palestrina mass but only long chains of beautiful consonances, arranged in simple rhythmic patterns.

We hear in it, and in much of the English music of that time, the divine order of musica mundana translated into sound. Like tourists entering a Gothic cathedral, we are struck by the foreignness of the minds who crafted it: a great human achievement devoid of humanism.

A font of wisdom I: Why we sing at mass

I'm currently devouring a musical book that treats many liturgical matters. No it's not William Mahrt's new book, which I do intend to read soon. It's Music in Medieval Britain, by Frank Ll. Harrison. Often musicology can feel like a waste of time to non-academic reader. I thank God for my good fortune that my encounter with the chant repertoire is in choir lofts and not in classrooms. But this is one of those books that I feel speaks directly to me on every page. It's a lot like The Stripping of the Altars, but devoted  only to music, with an overwhelming amount of archival evidence which reconstructs the musico-liturgical culture prior to the reformation.

I will have much to say on this book in coming posts. In fact it seems to me that mining such academic books for the kind of practical thinking about chant and polyphony is precisely the purpose of this blog.

Let me begin with this gem, in summation of a chapter on the financial and personal foundations of polyphony in the liturgy and on the votive antiphon sung in polyphony after liturgical functions:

In this period of a century and a half before the discarding of the medieval rites there was a remarkable growth and flowering of musical culture in all parts of the British in all parts of the British Isles…In the secular cathedrals and monasteries, the provision of chapels, altars and musical services outside the choir was a means of fostering the devotion of the laity, especially to the Virgin and to the Name and Passion of Jesus. Abbot Wheathamstead put this purpose clearly when he explained to his community that he wished to institute organistæ [singers of polyphony] for the singing of the Lady-Mass 'because wherever the Divine Service is more honourably celebrated the glory of the church is increased and the people are aroused to much greater devotion.'

The last bit is exactly why we ornament our liturgy with polyphony: for the glory of God, the glory of the church, and to foster the virtue of religion. Any music we use at mass should clearly promote these ends, or it is not worthy for use at the liturgy. This takes time and talent and work and money, which is a reality that we need to face. It was a fact widely known in pre-reformation England, as this book documents in detail. More on that soon.

Upcoming events

I've neglected this blog, I'm afraid, mainly because its original function of listing traditional liturgico-musical events is no longer necessary and does not fill a lack. For a long time I've been thinking about how to use this format to express my thoughts on our subject, which continues to occupy my mind, but that kind of long-term change keeps getting pushed to the back burner as the liturgical seasons grind on. Lætare, which to my mind has the most memorable and wonderful chants of the year, has passed unanalyzed. And so we approach again the end (the business end) of lent, and all I have to write at the moment is to spread the notice of a few imminent events.

The St. Mary's schola concert tomorrow night promises to be a worthy event. Lots of good, lenten polyphony, including some stunners from Tallis and Byrd. Please come and support our music program if you are able. 7:30 at St Mary's Norwalk. Full details here.

And there will be a Solemn Pontifical Mass at Holy Innocents on Monday evening for the feast of the Annunciation, preceded by confirmations. The mass setting is a seldom-heard Portuguese Renaissance one. It's quite beautiful, and worth the trip. Of course why would you need any further encouragement to see the Pontifical ceremonial. The confirmations start at 6.

I intend to start writing about chant-related items of more general interest again soon, so please stay tuned for new developments.

Venetian Vespers

I would like to post about a concert I'm singing in tonight in Manhattan. While not liturgical it certainly has some interest from the Catholic angle. It's music for Vespers and Compline by Johann Rosenmüller, a German composer active in Venice in the later Seventeenth Century. He's a remarkable composer because he bridges the gap in an important way between the two ends of the so-called Baroque era. He can be seen as a successor to Monteverdi, especially in the grand settings of the Vespers psalms and Magnificat which are the bulk of the program tonight. These are polychoral works in the grand Venetian tradition, accompanied by strings and brass. But in other ways he's a harbinger of things to come. He was a predecessor of Vivaldi at the Ospedale della Pietà, and earlier of Bach in Leipzig. Especially exciting is the way he combines the textural excitement of the Venetian concerted style with some really well-crafted counterpoint.

Unfortunately the scale of the music and the forces required would make it difficult to mount liturgically. But even in the concert setting, I think much of the grandeur of a seventeenth-century Vespers comes through.

And the concert is at the beautiful Anglo-Catholic church of St Ignatius of Antioch, a gem of English Gothic revival. Not to be missed is the lovely Lady chapel off the right transept. Catholic sensibilities as the basis of Christian unity, perhaps?

Details here.