The Case of L'homme Armé

explorations in renaissance culture 43 (2017) 109-139 brill.com/erc Streaming Music into Renaissance Studies: The Case of L’homme armé Kevin N. Moll East Carolina University [email protected] Abstract College-level courses devoted to Renaissance culture typically put a premium on incorporating primary sources and artifacts of a literary, art-historical, and historical nature. Yet the monuments of contemporaneous music continue to be marginalized as instructional resources, even though they are fully as worthy both from an aesthetic and from a historical standpoint. This study attempts to address that problem by invoking the tradition of early polyphonic masses on L’homme armé – a secular tune used as a unifying melody (cantus firmus) throughout settings of the five-movement liturgical cycle. Beginning by explaining the origins and significance of the putative monophonic tune, the paper then details how a series of composers utilized the song in interestingly varied ways in various mass settings. Subsequently it sketches out a context for mysticism in the liturgical-musical tradition of L’homme armé, and points to some compelling parallels with the contemporaneous art of panel painting, specifically as represented in the works of Rogier van der Weyden. Keywords Franco-Flemish polyphony – mass cycle – cantus firmus – pedagogy – L’homme armé – Rogier van der Weyden – mysticism * This paper is a substantially altered version of the South-Central Renaissance Conference William B. Hunter Lecture, delivered in St Louis, mo on March 3, 2011 with the title “Some Straight-Shooting Observations on the Early L’homme armee Masses.” Because the study is being published in a journal that traditionally has been devoted primarily to non-musical studies, effort has been made to refrain here from overindulgence in specialized musical vo- cabulary and to clarify those terms that are used. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/23526963-04302001Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 06:51:07AM via free access <UN> 110 Moll Our brave new world of academia tends to place a high value on—among other things—multi-disciplinary approaches to course content. Accordingly, a typical medieval history text these days will include information on period literature and art history, and to some extent those fields have been assimilated into mainstream courses of undergraduate study. On the other hand, the art of music remains decidedly a stepchild in that process. For example, whereas explaining the significance of the sculptural programs of Chartres cathedral lies well within the purview of an introductory course in medieval studies, no instructor or textbook author would feel it remiss if she or he refrained from including an equally detailed account of the organa quadrupla of the Parisian composer Perotinus—a precisely coeval figure.1 Even though the art of the latter is arguably no less significant historically than that of the former, current medieval and early modern survey courses are not any more likely to include music as an integral component than they ever were. Two factors primarily account for the diminishment in the modern era of the value of early music: first, the sonic monuments of the time, being subject to the need for re-creation, suffered a wholly ephemeral existence compared to buildings and visual artifacts, whose actuality does not depend upon exigen- cies of notation and performance. Thus, the historical continuity of the mas- sive cathedrals was more-or-less assured even in the face of centuries’ worth of changing fashions, whereas the contemporaneous music was not only neglect- ed in performance over time, it happened that musicians lost the ability even to decipher the period notation.2 The second major reason why early music continues to be devalued in comparison to its sister arts is the unfortunate fact that neither students nor their instructors are expected to possess the neces- sary competence in the fundamentals of music or its history. Yet it can hardly be disputed that the glorious achievements of music in the era of vocal polyphony emphatically parallel in quality the other 1 2 1 Reference is being made here to two works in particular, namely the Graduals Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes. Their composer, known as Perotinus magnus (fl. c. 1200), or simply Perotin, can in fact be put forward as one of the seminal figures in all of music history. The specimens of liturgical polyphony alluded to above are among the earliest surviving compositions in which four independent voice parts are coordinated within an environment of measured rhythm. 2 The result of this loss of contact with the repertoires of music before c. 1600 was that every aspect of notation and performance had to be thoroughly reinterpreted after a lapse of centuries. This process of restoration, which began around the mid-nineteenth century, required over 100 years of musicological study before historically informed performances became a practicality around the 1960s. explorations in renaissance Downloadedculture from 43 Brill.com10/05/2021 (2017) 109-139 06:51:07AM via free access <UN> Streaming Music into Renaissance Studies 111 contemporaneous arts.3 To that end, this paper is devoted to introducing one of the central phenomena of the latter fifteenth century, the L’homme armé mass, a topical tradition analogous to representations of, say, the Crusades, in the visual arts of the time, and to illustrating how non-specialist instructors might approach the challenge of how to present these compositions as significant representatives of artistic expression. Subsequently, I will attempt to illustrate some intriguing parallels that arise when considering this music in relation to other manifestations of contemporaneous culture. 1 L’homme Armé and the Liturgical Cantus-Firmus Cycle Any initiative toward integrating music convincingly into medieval or early modern studies entails the premise that instructors in diverse fields will need to possess a general understanding of Europe’s musical topography during the period concerned—the essaying of which is beyond the scope of this study.4 Here it will have to suffice simply to note that in the history of art music, the fifteenth century is notable as the period in which a musical style, steeped in both English and continental traditions and pioneered especially in France and the Low Countries (thus accounting for the term “Franco-Flemish” to designate the style), became a musical lingua franca in western Europe for some 150 years, i.e., from approximately 1450 to 1600. Concurrently, this era encompassed the great age of the cantus-firmus mass cycle, a multi-movement meta-genre of liturgical polyphony setting chorally the appropriate texts of the Mass Ordinary.5 In such works, a single melody, taken from a preexisting source and placed within a texture of several voices, served as a main element of formal continuity. 3 4 5 3 For present purposes, we can delimit this period to the eight centuries from Charlemagne’s accession in 768 to the Council of Trent’s dissolution in 1563, although polyphony per se may have arisen among the Franks only in the ninth century. 4 What has long been needed is an “appreciation” textbook geared solely to early music—a self-contained primer on fundamental musical elements, followed by a historical overview of significant issues and repertoires of Western music from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries. Given the narrowly market-driven policies of publishers these days, it is unlikely that any such introductory text will be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. 5 Polyphony refers to music with multiple independent melodic lines. Cantus firmus (discussed below) literally means “fixed song.” The choral items of the choral Mass Ordinary (listed in Example 1), having texts that do not vary from service to service, are distinct from the texts of the Mass Proper, but additionally are to be differentiated from those sections of the Or- dinary itself that are intoned by the priest (e.g., the Canon—part of the preparation for Communion). explorations in renaissance culture 43 (2017) 109-139Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 06:51:07AM via free access <UN> 112 Moll In an influential article published in 1950, Manfred Bukofzer claimed that aesthetic considerations were paramount in the creation of this monumental art form: The decisive step toward the [cantus-firmus Mass] cycle is … the [con- necting of] movements on the basis of the same tenor [melody] which establishes an unequivocal element of unity and … conditions the entire musical structure.6 Continuing in this vein, Bukofzer emphasized that in such cycles, the borrowed tenor melody—even when it is a plainchant—typically has no liturgical con- nection to the Ordinary items within which it is employed. Indeed, elsewhere in the same article, Bukofzer avers that: The distinction between liturgical and musical unity is a crucial point …. Without it the significance and spiritual background of the Mass cycle cannot possibly be understood. It takes a very bold and independent mind to conceive the idea that the invariable parts of the Mass should be composed not as separate liturgical items, but as a set of five musi- cally coherent compositions … The “absolute” work of art [thus] begins to encroach on liturgical function. We discover here the typical Renais- sance attitude—and it is indeed the Renaissance philosophy of art that furnishes the spiritual background to the cyclic Mass.7 More recent scholarship has questioned whether such aesthetic, “internal” elements were the primary factor motivating the development of such cycles, or whether various cultural-historical (i.e., “external”) conditions might better account for their creation, such that one can “comprehend choices of form and material as expressions not of purely artistic considerations, but rather of the specific circumstances in which the pieces in question arose.”8 As will be illustrated below, many studies over the past few decades have delved into circumstantial evidence as a key to unlocking cultural meaning in the sacred polyphony of the time.

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