Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD5 - The Polyphonic Mass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

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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

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THE POLYPHONIC MASS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE

Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame was probably composed in the early 1360s. With all the subsequent developments of western classical music it is astonishing that, even today, performances of this stunning masterpiece can still have the power to evoke audience reactions ranging from shock to incredulity. Employing dazzling rhythmic exuberance and a harmonic language that seemingly flies in the face of convention, both medieval and modern, this radical work occupies a sound-world that defies simple definition. Every generation that has experienced this music has been able to listen to it as if it were ‘new’ music. Presenting the Messe offers a wonderfully liberating licence to discard pre-ordained musical labels, and it is this freedom that has inspired the juxtaposition of the pieces presented in this collection. The gap of nearly 650 years between the composition of the oldest and newest works becomes an irrelevancy.

Machaut’s personal inspiration for writing the Messe may have been intimations of his own mortality. Born some time around the year 1300, he was, by the standards of his day, an old man and he was in poor health. Despite his international fame as a poet, he was given little respect at court when attending the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of Normandy, ridiculed in particular for his infatuation with the teenage dedicatee of his poems, Péronne. All this was set against the background of desperate times: the Black Death was a very recent memory, and France was still suffering appallingly from the ravages of the ongoing Hundred Years War. While the Messe would surely have been sung in Guillaume’s own lifetime, his will established a fund that would help to pay for a posthumous weekly sung celebration of Mass in Reims Cathedral in his memory.

Broadly speaking, the movements of the Messe adopt two styles. The Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei are lyrical and sensual, employing long, sweeping phrases. Dissonances are paraded totally shamelessly, right up to the point where pain crosses seamlessly into ecstasy. (Although medieval and modern perceptions of dissonance differ, the harmonies defy the standard rules of both medieval and modern consonance.) Even in these gentle movements, however, there are moments of intricate syncopation that relate to the general exuberance of the Gloria, Credo and Ite missa est. Here there is an urgency in the rapid statement of the texts that is broken only for very specific reasons: the slow statement of ‘et in terra pax’ (‘. . . and on earth peace’) in the Gloria, for example, is surely a reference to the existing state of war, while, as noted by the Machaut scholar Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘ex Maria Virgine’ (‘. . . of the Virgin Mary’) in the Credo pointedly alludes to the dedication of Reims Cathedral to Our Lady. There is a cumulative power and drive contained in the music, both slow and fast, pulling the listener onward. For pure, unrestrained fervour and joy, the ‘Amen’ section of the Gloria, with its extraordinary vocal pyrotechnics in the lowest voice, is utterly remarkable. – A. S.

THE RENAISSANCE MASS

During the Renaissance, masses were the most highly regarded genre of polyphonic music because of their religious ‘status’ and because they were a means of measuring the mastery of compositional technique. Destined for the liturgy, the polyphonic

mass was based on the Ordinary, or the ‘common’ immutable texts, namely the fixed parts recurring daily in each celebrationKyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. In this respect the creation of the cyclic mass was the most novel and durable musical invention of the fifteenth century. In its final form, the mass was compositionally organised in five parts forming a cycle unified by a melodic element common to the five movements called the cantus firmus (fixed chant). This ‘borrowed’ melody appeared throughout the mass as an unchanging ‘constant’. The principle was not new in itself: in the Middle Ages polyphony was born out of the addition of a new voice to an existing Gregorian melody. The true innovation was in the construction’s monumental character (five parts) beginning with a single element. It should be pointed out that the cantus firmus, most often presented in long note-values, could come from either the secular or the religious repertory.

However, in the cantus firmus mass the added voices were generally not based on the borrowed melody, sung by the tenor. On the contrary, in the paraphrase mass the cantus firmus largely supplied the thematic material for the voices that ‘surrounded’ this melodic core. The cantus firmus mass might be compared to a medieval painting that juxtaposes several disparate scenes around the principal theme. The paraphrase mass, in which all the voices are generally ‘equal partners’ united by their melodic relationship, derives from a conception proper to the Renaissance where perspective establishes links between all the elements. The Missa ‘Pange Lingua’ by Josquin Desprez (c.1440-1521), the most famous composer of his time, certainly constitutes one of the most eloquent examples of the paraphrase mass: in all parts of this magnificent work the melody of the Gregorian hymn serves as the starting point for rich imitative counterpoint infusing all the voices.

Built on the hymn Pange lingua (in the third tone) for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Josquin’s composition is clearly intended for the Corpus Christi Mass. At least two of the manuscript sources which have come down to us designate it as Missa de Venerabili Sacramento.

Musicologists agree that it is a late work, probably composed in the last fifteen years of his life (around 1515). In any case, Petrucci does not seem to have known it in 1514, because he did not include it in his third volume of the composer’s masses. Moreover, it was not to be published until much later, in 1539, in the Missae Tredecim by the German publisher Ott. In about 1517, at any rate, it was already known in Italy, because the lutenist Vincenzo Capirola put it into tablature. The mass seems to have been very well known and widely performed throughout Europe: it is found in at least sixteen manuscripts and four printed editions in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

The tune of the hymn Pange lingua serves as the material or ‘subject’ throughout the Ordinary. In this the mass stands apart from other works like Josquin’s Missa ‘De Beata Virgine’, where in fact it is the melodies of the Ordinary that furnish the respective subjects for each of the movements: this mass is, therefore, placed under the sign of variety, as in a plainchant Ordinary. By contrast, the Missa ‘Pange lingua’ is all formal unity, like the masses constructed on a single theme, such as the Missae ‘L’Homme armé’ or ‘Hercules Dux Ferrariae’ by the same composer. However, the use made by Josquin of the fundamental melody is quite different from the old cantus firmus technique used all through the fifteenth century – in the two masses mentioned above, for example. Here the tune is treated with great freedom: paraphrased and developed in all the parts, it irrigates, as it were, the polyphonic texture, essentially constituted of counterpoint in imitation. The reader will understand, however, that the liturgical intention, superficially neglected, is here transcended to make way for a more elevated sense of the liturgical situation, that of the Feast of Corpus Christi itself, emblematically stamped on the whole work by the ‘popular’ tune of the hymn, Pange lingua. – J.-P. O.

The two masses left by Janequin (in fact, the polyphonic setting of the five sections of the Ordinary, which publishers and copyists got into the habit of designating by the term Missa, followed by a musical reference that enabled the piece in question to be identified) belong to the technique called the missa parodia: the composer borrowed, either from one of his own works

or from one, generallly well-known, by another composer, the polyphonic material associated with a text. He then reworked it, adapting it to the Latin text of the Ordinary which was familiar to everyone. The composer’s skill in using the basic material of the earlier piece, drawing close to it and moving away from it without becoming incoherent, according to the prosodic and semantic demands of the new situation, was at that period regarded as confirming his prestige quite as effectively as a new work would.

The Missa ‘La Bataille’, on the superb invitatory opening of Janequin’s La Guerre (a piece that should be regarded as much as a cantata as a chanson), was published in Lyon in 1532 by Jacques Moderne in a sumptuously printed collection of six masses ‘by famous authors’. It is thought to date from Janequin’s period in Anjou. The singer familiar with the earlier piece has no difficulty in grasping the spatial characteristics and the almost heraldic sonorities which are maintained throughout the mass. But the most thrilling aspect of all is perhaps the ‘conversion’, through the grace of God and the composer’s skill, of a battle-song (which was listened to in fear and trembling) into a song of peace in the three settings of the Agnus Dei, so simple and direct. – J.-Y. H.

Lassus’s mass is not built on a monophonic melody, but on a polyphonic chanson by Nicolas Gombert, Tous les regretz, which gives the work its name. Lassus retains all the basic ingredients of Gombert’s chanson: the six voices, the ‘tonality’ (Dorian mode on G), the melodic elements, and the striking harmonic twists. But of course he does not confine himself to meekly reusing Gombert’s material. He takes over and transforms the themes, embroidering them, developing them to adapt them to the text and structure of the mass. In so doing, he produces a textbook example of the sixteenth-century ‘parody mass’, a technique whereby a pre-existing work, while still remaining the basis of the piece, underwent a complete contrapuntal metamorphosis. – P. V. N.

The publication dates of Palestrina’s works offer no reliable evidence, in the present state of our knowledge, of their exact place in his creative career. A fair number of these publications were posthumous, as is the case, for instance, of the Missa ‘Viri Galilaei’ (based on the motet of the same name), which was published only in 1601, seven years after the composer’s death, in the Missarum . . . Liber Duodecimus, by Scotto of Venice.

Here the initial subjects of the two parts of the motet from which the mass is derived provide the opening invention of each of the main parts respectively of the movements in several sections. Palestrina demonstrates a consummate mastery of the art of variation, worthy of contending with the most inventive instrumental composers: a virtually inexhaustible practice of truly virtuoso combinatorics, handled without a trace of aridity. Technique is here deployed to serve the text, as is borne out by the musical exploitation of the numerous anaphoric movements of the Credo and the Gloria – in other words, in the service of the Christian message.

The association of musical images of the Ascension (‘Ascendit Deus’) and the Crucifixion is not the result of chance, but a deliberate choice replete with meaning, an illuminating metaphor, a provocative and significant brachylogy: Palestrina composes as a preacher, his polyphony is a sermon. What he is offering us here is no less than a theological commentary on Jesus’ words as reported by St John: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die’ (John XII. 32-33). – J.-P. O.

William Byrd’s settings of the Roman Catholic liturgical texts are a remarkable testament not only to his immense musical skill but also to his tenacity. He was apparently a convert, since the brothers whom John Harley writes about in his recent biography (1997) were Protestant. William could have accommodated his religion to the prevailing climate. Instead he chose the harder

path, submitting himself and his family from 1584 onward to the scrutiny of the law and the possibility of heavy fines. Byrd wrote three settings of the Ordinary, one each for three, four and five voices, and took the possibly dangerous course of having them printed (if not officially published). As Peter Clulow has demonstrated, Thomas East, Byrd’s regular printer, undertook the work, leaving the slim four-page partbooks untitled, possibly as a precaution. The four-voice setting was the first to be printed, in 1592-93; it makes a specific reference to the ‘Meane’ Mass of Byrd’s early Tudor predecessor, John Taverner, as well as following its ground plan fairly faithfully – a strategy that raises significant questions about Byrd’s intent. In the Sanctus, Byrd uses Taverner’s opening point of imitation (in a much more developed manner) and, to hammer home what he is doing, he also briefly refers to Taverner’s ‘tail motif’, a passage at the end of the Hosanna whose slightly archaic character Byrd camouflages by making it appear to arise quite naturally out of his preceding line. – P. Be.

Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD5 - The Polyphonic Mass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance　La messe polyphonique du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance (1)

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Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD5 - The Polyphonic Mass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance La messe polyphonique du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance (1)

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Sacred Music: From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century CD5 - The Polyphonic Mass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance　La messe polyphonique du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance (1)