Josquin Des Prez in Fact and Legend
Personal Prayer : Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteent... http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780... Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin See also from Grove Music Online Marian antiphon Guillaume Du Fay PERSONAL PRAYER Chapter: CHAPTER 13 Middle and Low Source: MUSIC FROM THE EARLIEST NOTATIONS TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Author(s): Richard Taruskin These Marian antiphon settings sound a conspicuously personal note that we have not previously encountered in liturgical music. That is another aspect of “middling” tone; but it accords well with the votive aspects of Marian worship, the component of the Christian liturgy that in those days was most intensely “personal.” That, too, was something that could be thematized by a knowing composer, especially a knowing churchman-composer. The supreme case in point for a fifteenth-century motet is the third and most splendid setting Du Fay made of the Marian antiphon Ave Regina coelorum, copied into the choirbooks of Cambrai Cathedral in 1465. It is as impressive a motet as Du Fay or anyone ever composed, but it is impressive in an altogether different way from his earlier large-scale motet settings. Where the isorhythmic Nuper rosarum flores (Ex. 8-8) had impressed by its monumentality, Ave Regina coelorum impresses with an altogether unprecedented expressive intensity—unprecedented, that is, within the motet genre. The personal and votive aspect of this motet are epitomized in a moving set of tropes that Du Fay interpolated into the canonical text of the antiphon, representing a prayer for his own salvation that he wanted sung at his deathbed, and that he wanted to go on being recited after his death in perpetuity, for which, a rich man, he provided an endowment in his will: Ave regina coelorum, Hail, O Queen of Heaven! Ave Domina angelorum, Hail, O Ruler of the Angels! Miserere tui Have mercy on labentis Dufaÿ Thy failing Du Fay, Ne peccatorum throw him not into the in ignem fervorum.
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