Antoine Brumel 9:13 Than Recording Is, After All, What Music Is About

CORO hilliard live CORO hilliard live 3 The Hilliard Ensemble For more than three decades now The Hilliard Ensemble has been active in the realms of both early and contemporary music. As well as recording and performing music by composers such as Pérotin, Dufay, Josquin and Bach the ensemble has been involved in the creation of a large number of new works. James MacMillan, Heinz Holliger, Arvo Pärt, Steven Hartke and many other composers have written both large and small-scale pieces for them. The ensemble’s performances frequently include collaborations with other musicians such as the saxophonist Jan Garbarek, violinist ANTOINE Christoph Poppen, violist Kim Kashkashian and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. BRUMEL John Potter’s contribution was crucial to getting the Hilliard Live project under way. John has since left to take up a post in the Music Department of York University. His place in the group has been filled by Steven Harrold. www.hilliardensemble.demon.co.uk the hilliard ensemble To find out more about CORO and to buy CDs, visit www.thesixteen.com cor16052 The hilliard live series of recordings came about for various reasons. At the time self-published recordings were a fairly new and increasingly ANTOINE common phenomenon in popular music and we were keen to see if we could make the process work for us in the context of a series of BRUMEL public concerts. Perhaps the most important motive for this experiment was our desire to capture the atmosphere and excitement of concert performances of some of our favourite repertoire. Performance rather 1 Kyrie and Gloria Antoine Brumel 9:13 than recording is, after all, what music is about. There is the unavoidable (Missa Victimae paschali laudes) risk that all will not be perfect; audience noise or human frailty on our 2 Lauda: O divina virgo Anon. 2:28 part may detract from the polished perfection that can be achieved with 3 Ave, virgo gloriosa Antoine Brumel 10:27 a studio recording but such risks are part of our daily life of concert giving and lend to the event an added degree of excitement and, we 4 Lauda: Salve, salve, virgo pia Anon. 2:20 hope, engagement with the audience. 5 Mater Patris Antoine Brumel 3:23 We are happy to make this series of discs more widely available on CORO. 6 Credo Antoine Brumel 8:44 Gordon Jones 7 Nativitas unde gaudia Antoine Brumel 5:47 8 Lauda: Regina sovrana Anon. 2:47 The Hilliard Ensemble on CORO: 9 Sanctus and Benedictus Antoine Brumel 7:43 hilliard live 1 Pérotin and the Ars Antiqua bl Lauda: Oi me lasso Anon. 3:12 hilliard live 2 For Ockeghem bm O Crux, ave, spes unica Antoine Brumel 1:50 hilliard live 3 Antoine Brumel bn Agnus Dei Antoine Brumel 5:51 coming soon: hilliard live 4 Guillaume Dufay www.thesixteen.com Total playing time 64:27 2 3 ComposIng and, since he is not able to count upon des faicts et dicts héroiques du bon further thirty or so liturgical works of the sheer vocal extravagance of twelve Pantagruel (1552), by the Italian poet other kinds. The secular music comprises BRUMEL independent parts, arguably more. Teofilo Folengo in his Le Maccheronee, five chansons and nine instrumental by the chronicler Eloy d’Amerval, by the pieces. or a composer, the experience of It is clear that Brumel was much admired theorists Gaffurio and Glareanus, and, editing music by another composer in his own time: The Mass on this recording survives F finally, by Thomas Morley (who praised is always an exciting one. In a sense, in various sources, and was printed in “Agricolla, Verbonnet, Prioris, his and Josquin’s canonic skill in his Plaine it is 'virtual composing': one sees the Petrucci’s Misse Brumel of 1503. It is Josquin Desprez, Gaspar, Brunel, Compère and Easie Introduction to Practicall music appear under one’s fingertips with built upon the first phrase of the Easter Ne parlez plus de joyeux chantz ne ris, Musicke); and on his death Brumel in something of the same breathlessness sequence Victimae paschali laudes: Mais composez ung Ne recorderis, his turn was commemorated by an which accompanies the gradual one of Brumel’s characteristics, and one Pour lamenter nostre maistre et bon père.” extraordinary number of laments. materialization of one’s own work, which is typical of that 'architectural' Thus Guillaume Crétin, in his Déploration but there is an added element of His career took him from Chartres, approach, is the building up of works on the death of Ockeghem (read in unpredictability, and, with a composer near which city he was born in around from relatively short melodic fragments English translation by Bob Peck on as imaginative as Brumel, of excitement. 1460 (thus making him genuinely French or tags. This technique is seen at its COR16048: 'For Ockeghem'). Josquin, rather than Burgundian) and in whose height in the twelve-part Mass, in which Brumel’s music has an almost Brumel and Compère are also called cathedral he became a singer at about the composer could hardly depend upon architectural sense of space: as one sees upon to lament the passing of Ockeghem the age of twenty-three, to Geneva, conventional imitative counterpoint; during the course of transcription the in another Déploration, by Jean Molinet Laon, Paris, Chambéry, and the d’Este he uses the first seven notes of the cascades of melody materializing around (the one set to music by Josquin): the scaffolding of the long notes of the court at Ferrara, where he spent the antiphon Et ecce terrae motus, in three cantus firmus, one has the feeling that “Acoutrez vous d’habits de deuil, years 1506-10. part canon in long notes over which the Josquin, Piersson, Brumel, Compere, gothic extravagances of the remaining he is moulding musical material in what Brumel’s output includes a series of Et plourez grosses larmes d’oeil” eight parts may unfold. In the Missa one might describe as a plastic way. He fifteen complete Masses (whose gems Victimae paschali the treatment is more is also a composer of astonishing range, It is no accident that Brumel appears include a Missa pro defunctis which conventional, but even so, it is significant as one might expect of the man who in both summonses, at the side of boasts the first-known polyphonic that he uses only this short motif as a wrote the twelve-part Missa Et ecce Josquin; he was in fact one of the setting of the sequence Dies irae, and basis for generating his melodies: these terrae motus: at the opposite end of most talked-about composers of the the aforementioned Missa Et ecce are the bricks and mortar from which the scale are his tiny three-part motets, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He is terrae motus for twelve voices), four he constructs his edifices. which show just as much invention mentioned by Rabelais in the Quart livre independent Credo settings, and a 4 5 In the Kyrie, for example, three of the on certain notes or figures within a succession pure unadorned homophony, The Benedictus offers some respite, but voices enter, from the bass upwards, phrase, naturally emphasizes the rather frantic melodic roulades, imitative duets Osanna ut supra... with the first three notes of the cantus obsessive quality of much of his writing. and tremendously resourceful textural The triple Agnus Dei is constructed firmus, G-F-G, and then spin entirely The second Kyrie abandons the cantus variety. The only thing holding this rather like a motet. It opens with the independent melodies from this. (The firmus in favour of freely imitative four- compendium of Brumel’s various traditional imitation at the fifth and insistent alternation of G and F seems part writing. compositional techniques together until octave, and then the cantus firmus to have held something of a fascination the very end is the cantus firmus in the The Gloria opens with Brumel’s favourite enters. The second section contrasts for Brumel - the motets Nativitas unde first tenor part. The Sanctus appears alternation of G and F chords, and is in upper and lower paired voices and gaudia, Mater Patris and Ave, Ancilla to offer relative calm, but its stately predominantly long values, in contrast finishes with a triple time section for Trinitatis all open in this way). When pace is thrown to the winds with the with the much more active Kyrie. A real all four voices, and the third is an the cantus firmus itself enters, the other utmost subtlety: 'Pleni sunt caeli' is a change occurs, as one comes to expect extended, elaborate imititative trio, voices begin new phrases built around duet between the top two voices which in 15th century Mass settings, with the well displaying Brumel’s contrapuntal a minor third, an interval which has a becomes increasingly active and is then 'Qui tollis' section. The time changes resource, over the cantus firmus in the great melodic importance throughout passed on to the second tenor and to triple meter and a certain breathless bass. Brumel’s motets are as little-known the Mass. The Christe is a free melodic bass, so that by the time we land on the wildness characterizes the melodic as his Masses. In transcribing a selection fantasy (the minor third very prominent) word 'gloria', the full four-part scoring writing, recalling - to this composer’s of them for the Hilliard Ensemble, I had over the cantus firmus which is and the change of time, which produces ears - both Ockeghem and Obrecht.

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