Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD3

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共19首歌曲

艺人: Various Artists
语种: 拉丁语
厂牌: Harmonia Mundi ‎
发行时间: 2009年01月01日
专辑类别: 录音室专辑

专辑介绍

As a spontaneous embellishment of the liturgy, the earliest polyphony was improvised, hence unknown to us! All that survivesis the treatises explaining how to realise it. The first method they present, the doubling of the plainchant a fourth below, is more like an effect of timbre. But from the polyphony of St Martial of Limoges onwards, the voices become individualised. The process was taken further by the Notre Dame School in the twelfth century. The exploration of polyphony in three, then four voices made it necessary to abandon the subjective pulse of plainchant and measure note values with precision, so as to control part-crossing. It became indispensable to know when dissonances would occur in order to resolve them on consonances. This in turn led composers to classify intervals into families. However, all such classifications show considerable differences between the European mainland and the English, who were the only ones to use unprepared thirds and sixths. In fact it is thanks to the notes of an English student, in a document which Coussemaker catalogued as ‘Anonymous IV’, that we know of the first two great identified composers in musical history, Léonin and Pérotin (‘little Leo’ and ‘little Peter’), and can attribute numerous works to them.

POLYPHONY IN AQUITAINE (ST MARTIAL OF LIMOGES)

The birth of polyphonic chanting is generally attributed to the reference made to it by ‘Hucbald of St Amand’ (in fact, a certain Otger of Laon) in a ninth-century treatise entitled Musica Enchiriadis, in which the writer describes what is known as parallel organum. This consisted of a Gregorian melody (vox principalis) in regular notes doubled by a consonant ‘organal’ voice, which meant, at the time, in almost strictly parallel fourth or fifths. Only the tritone F-B (the modern augmented fourth) was proscribed on account of its highly dissonant sound. But this diabolus in musica would, in fact, timidly pave the way to genuine musical creativity: the ‘composer’ had to find another consonance, like octave or unison doubling. These intervals often became the point of departure or conclusion.

It is needless to say that a system like this could only develop and become more varied, if only by the slow and progressive emergence of the notion of contrary motion, one melodic line ascending while the other descends (in spite of frequent crossings, the vox principalis remained the lower). It is in this rule that the essentials of Western counterpoint lie.

With those of Chartres and Winchester, the manuscripts of Saint Martial in Limoges – a vital artistic centre in the twelfth century and an important meeting place due to its position on the road to Compostela – constitute the most important evidence of this practice. Marcel Pérès has pointed out the difficulties in reading and performing this repertory today: ‘It is not easy to read (diastematic point notation, but with an imaginary stave), the rhythm cannot be found in the graphic signs alone, and what is more, this music demands an extremely virtuosic vocal technique. . . . Wherever the ornamentation becomes complex and expands into flourishes the movement is created by the dynamic power of the consonances and dissonances. . . . The third and the sixth are out of tune, that is to say, they generate beats and instability. . . . The music of Romanesque Aquitaine is an incredible art of synthesis in which the connoisseur can discern elements of the art of polyphony described by philosophers and theorists since the ninth century, as well as visionary intuitions of genius. In a similar way to the music of J. S. Bach in a later era, this music carries within it all the experience of a tradition that informs and gives life to a creative projection into the future.’

The immediate future of Western polyphony was to be played out in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Paris.

THE NOTRE DAME SCHOOL

Just as the vitality of secular lyrical creativity moved from southern Europe (troubadours) to the north (trouvères, Minnesänger), numerous artistic impulses were to be found north of the Loire: Romanesque art made way for the immense

Gothic cathedrals, and talented musicians gathered in the great song-school of Notre Dame in Paris, whose prestige grew withthe laying of the foundations of the cathedral in 1163, the expansion of Paris in the reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), and the founding of the University in 1227 by Robert de Sorbon, who gave it his name.

At the beginning of the twelfth century Paris was already a shining light throughout Christianity ‘thanks to the quality of its singers and above all to the skill with which they improvised their organa’ (Marcel Pérès). Three of the names of the great musicians who succeeded each other in the extremely close circle of the episcopal school have come down to us: Magister Albert, by whom only a three-part conductus has survived; Léonin, thought to have been active in the mid-twelfth century; and Pérotin who was writing at the turn of the thirteenth century. The two-part compositions are generally attributed to Léonin: collected in the Magnus Liber Organi (cf. CD 2), some of them are supposed to have been altered by Pérotin, the composer of highly impressive three- and four-part organa. The Magnus Liber Organi having disappeared, these pieces come from thirteenth-century compilations in which the rhythmic notation is always subordinate to the play between consonances and dissonances.

The Mass for Christmas Day presented here dates from the mid-twelfth century. The Introit is richly troped, a practice that was constantly expanding in the Middle Ages, with their insatiable appetite for ornamentation and illumination. Here each gloss is sung by a soloist. Each imploration of the Kyrie is first stated by the soloist, sustained, then repeated by the choir in unison, and then in parallel organum. The Gradual Viderunt omnes is one of the most celebrated ‘florid’ organa of the Notre Dame School: each note of the Gregorian melody (tenor) is endlessly prolonged, while increasingly beautiful and longer chains of melismas are superimposed on the vox organalis.

After the Gospel, the liturgy enters into a state of symbolic contemplation of the mystery of the Eucharist. The chants now assume a totally different character: the tropes of the Sanctus are sung in organum and the notes of the tenor of the Ite missa est are drawn out to the extreme, practically to the point of immobility, ‘while the illumination in the discantus develops in a continuous ornamentation of the intervals of the fifth and the octave. Could one find a more explicit symbol of eternity impregnating time?’ (Marcel Pérès).

HOQUETUS Medieval European Vocal Music

Hoquetus: hocket/hoqueter (French); ‘to hiccup’; also known as truncatio.

Hocketing dates back to at least the twelfth century (most memorably in the music of Pérotin) and seems to have arisen from the practice of improvising variations on an existing melody. It probably existed long before the invention of musical notation and can be found in African music as well as European. More recently the technique has been reactivated by composers such as György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich, Kevin Volans, and Louis Andriessen (who used the word hoketus both for a composition and a performing group).

A hocket is the placing of two parts on top of one another, so that where one part has rests the other has notes, and vice versa; the resulting combination creates a continuity out of two parts which in themselves are discontinuous. Such music is built on the close exchange of notes or short groups of notes, and prepares the way for other medieval polyphonic techniques such as voice exchange (where the groups of notes become short phrases) and canonic imitation. It also leads quite naturally towards isorhythmic patterns, and the layered voices we find in many medieval motets.

Three different types of hocket may be identified: the variation hocket (based on pre-existent polyphony), of which no complete examples survive, since it was indeed an improvisational technique; the independent hocket where hocketing is the main

feature of the entire piece; and the incidental hocket, where hocket is used as an ornamental or climactic device. – P.H.

OTHER ASPECTS OF POLYPHONY

From the Renaissance until today, the Catholic Church has periodically found it necessary to suppress the influence of the Virgin Mary in its liturgy and traditions. Her cult, at certain times and places, became so zealous that Mary-worship overshadowed even the adoration of the Deity. Western Europe during the Gothic era – the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries – was without any doubt one of these times and places. Cathedrals soared to the heavens, many, if not most of them, dedicated to Mary, like the cathedrals of Notre Dame at Paris and Chartres. Rhetoric honouring Mary in prose, poetry and song was as ardent as any ever put on paper, surpassing even the florid love lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères, and borrowing many of their romantic turns of phrase.

We begin with pieces from thirteenth-century France. These pieces in Latin are all conductus, a generic term derived from the practice of using paraliturgical vocal music to accompany, or ‘conduct’ processions during solemn services. Certain characteristics separate conductus from other Latin compositions of their time: they are settings of poetry – usually, but not always, religious; they are not based on any pre-existing plainchant melodies, as are the motet and organum; and, in polyphonic conductus (i.e., for more than one voice part), the singers all declaim the same text together. Some conductus are all about declamation and others are about virtuosic display, with a minimum of text (Ave Maria gratia plena). There is an old, hard-dying belief that in medieval vocal compositions text and music bear little relation to each other. It is impossible to hear sweet and touching songs like Ave nobilis venerabilis without realising that their composers were as capable of sensitive text-setting as they were of vocal fireworks.

With far greater fervour than was the case on the continent, a wave of passionate adoration of the Virgin Mary swept through medieval England. Two-thirds of the English polyphony that has survived from this period is associated with her cult. Marian Masses and votive Offices were said and sung daily in the churches and cathedrals, such as Salisbury (where the cathedral is, incidentally, consecrated to St Mary). Unfortunately, unlike the French motet, the fragmentation and dispersal of the English sources oblige performers to resort to various different manuscripts and to match them in order to obtain a coherent programme. In the excerpts from the Marian Mass presented here the Kyrie and the Gloria come from the same manuscript and manifest the same virtuosic whirlwinds of ornamental pitches. The Kyrie is also endowed with a trope in honour of the ‘Christifera’ (what was borne by Christ). The Sanctus is composed in the style of a conductus, while the Agnus Dei is in the ‘alternatim’ style, in which the ‘official’ plainsong alternates with its polyphonic Marian trope.

Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD3 - The Birth of Polyphony　La naissance de la polyphonie (1100-1300)

专辑介绍

最新简评（共22条）

Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD3 - The Birth of Polyphony La naissance de la polyphonie (1100-1300)

专辑介绍

最新简评（共22条）

Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD3 - The Birth of Polyphony　La naissance de la polyphonie (1100-1300)