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English Catholic Music from 1400-1600

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English Catholic Music from 1400-1600 King Solomon’s Singers present: Cathedrals and Attic Rooms: English Catholic Music From 1400-1600. Saturday, September 22, 8PM St. Clement Church, Chicago CATHEDRALS AND ATTIC ROOMS: ENGLISH CATHOLIC MUSIC FROM 1400-1600 Nesciens mater John Trouluffe (d. ca. 1473) Quam pulchra es John Dunstable (ca. 1390-1453) Anna mater matris Christi John Plummer (ca. 1410-1483) Magnificat super “O bone Jesu” Robert Fayrfax (1464-1521) Gaude flore virginali William Horwud (1430-1484) Lamentations I Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) Ne irascaris Domine / Civitas sancti tui William Byrd (1540-1623) NOTES ON THE PROGRAM In 1534, the Parliament of England passed the Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the Church of England and officially separating English religious practice from Rome and Papal authority. Among the innumerable historical consequences of this event was a significant change in the composition and performance of sacred choral music in England. Until this point, effectively all sacred music in England had been composed for the Roman liturgy or for devotions within the Catholic faith. A strong line of influential composers over the course of over two centuries had developed a clearly definable English Catholic style, most readily identifiable in the works of the Eton Choirbook era. This style of composition is typified by relatively simple underlying harmonic structure decorated with long, ornately melismatic lines—a musical architecture often compared with the Perpendicular Gothic style of English cathedral architecture. This feature of pre-Reformation English sacred music, and the fact that the texts were in Latin, made it an obvious target for the Reformation impulses toward simplicity and the individual’s direct access to God. Henry VIII, himself a composer and a liturgically conservative person, allowed this style of elaborate polyphony to be performed in the new liturgy of the Church of England, but his successor, Edward VI, strongly suppressed it. Despite the brief restoration of England to Catholicism under Mary Tudor, the Roman rite in England, and, with it, the tradition of English Catholic polyphony was forced underground for good (or at least until the 19th century) upon Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne in 1558. This is not, however, to say that no English Catholic music was composed after 1558. In fact, arguably the two greatest composers of sacred polyphony in Elizabethan England—Thomas Tallis and William Byrd—were both unrepentant Catholics. However, the sacred music they published needed to be suitable for use in the official state Church, not the Church of their private worship. These two composers’ true faith found expression in two ways: the secret composition of liturgical music for the Roman rite (such as Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices), intended for performance by a small group of believers in a concealed space; and the choice of texts for their officially published works. Themes such as the Babylonian captivity, the desolation of Jerusalem, and the forty years in the desert are to be found in abundance in both composers’ official output: the cathedral of ornate expression reduced to the attic room of the subliminal. Our tour through the development of the English Catholic style begins in what Howard Mayer Brown calls the beginning of Renaissance music itself: the era of John Dunstable and the “Contenance Angloise.” Brown quotes a contemporary Burgundian writer as praising the Frenchmen Dufay and Binchois for “wear[ing] the English guise (‘la contenance angloise’) and imitating Dunstable’s sweetly consonant compositions—such was the strength of the English tradition already in the early 1400s. Our first piece, the Nesciens mater of John Trouluffe (or Treloff), actually illustrates a slightly earlier style, that of the faburden (related, but not identical, to the continental fauxbourdon). In this style of three-part music, plainchant is sung by the middle voice, with the top and bottom voices harmonizing, often in 6-3 chords. We then present one of the most famous pieces of the era, Dunstable’s Quam pulchra es. As befits the lush imagery of the Song of Songs text, Dunstable indulges in almost complete consonance, with only the most minimal and brief dissonances immediately resolved. Our final Contenance Angloise piece, the Anna mater matris Christi of John Plummer, points in many ways to the era of the great choirbooks, which we explore next. The text is a votive antiphon to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. The text is from the rhymed office for the feast of St. Anne, and Plummer uses an ingenious bit of musical parallelism to link the outer verses. In both verses, he uses a simple descending octave scale as the main motif, decorated slightly differently in the two verses, and passed between the nearly equal three lower voices. However, he sets the first verse in triple meter and the second in duple, achieving very different effects with similar musical material. We also see in Plummer’s work the use of solo voices to provide sonic contrast—and to negotiate some of the more treacherous passages—a technique that our next set of composers uses to great effect. It is clear from their surviving output that the two generations of composers immediately following the Contenance Angloise era reached a level of compositional complexity that is in unequaled in polyphonic choral writing, except perhaps in the works of the Ars Subtilior period. Unfortunately, we cannot examine the full opus of composers such as Browne, Hygons, Fayrfax, and Cornysh, because much of their work was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries after the passage of the Act of Supremacy. Only three major choirbooks survive from this period, all named for their current resting places: Eton, Lambeth, and Caius. Eton is the greatest of the three, both in scope and in volume, containing 93 works (of which 64 survive) by over 20 different composers; by contrast, Lambeth and Caius have fewer than 20 works each. The works in all three choirbooks have significant stylistic commonalities, including majestic blocks of harmony in opening passages and cadences, woven together by long passages of rhythmically complex, melismatic counterpoint, often setting many dozens of notes on a single syllable of text. Our first work from this period is from one of the most famous early Tudor composers, Robert Fayrfax. Fayrfax created a trilogy of pieces on similar musical material as a gift to the Guild of the Holy Name of Jesus: he composed an antiphon for the Office of the Holy Name on the text “O bone Jesu,” and he created a parody Mass and Magnificat from the antiphon’s themes. We perform the Magnificat tonight. This work is composed in alternatim style, with alternating verses of the canticle set to chant and polyphony, including polyphonic sections for full choir and soloists, resulting in a satisfying variety of texture. Our second work is a seldom-performed Eton Choirbook masterpiece by William Horwud (or Horwood), Gaude flore virginali. Like Plummer’s Anna mater matris Christi, Horwud’s text is a rhyming devotional hymn, here a poem to the “Seven Joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary” attributed to St. Thomas of Canterbury. Even more so than the Fayrfax Magnificat, Horwud’s composition sets duets and trios of delicate filigree against massive, full-choir sonorities to thrilling effect. We are performing this work tonight from a new edition by Francis Steele, whom we thank for providing the as-yet-unpublished scores (and alerting us to the existence of the piece). The tone of the evening shifts distinctly as we turn to the last two pieces on the program. The Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah are part of the liturgy of Lent and Holy Week, but the imagery of the desolation of the Holy City and the admonition: “Jerusalem convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum” (Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God) must have had special significance for a Catholic living in a land where his Church had fallen, and his faith was outlawed. Thomas Tallis set the first five verses of the Book of Lamentations, the first two in his Lamentations I, which we perform tonight. In the original Hebrew, these five verses are “indexed” by the first letter of each verse—i.e., the opening word of each of the five verses begin with the first five letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, and Heth. This “acrostic” is lost in the Latin translation, but Tallis sets the Hebrew letter of each verse to its own polyphonic section. Tallis draws out the bitterness and sorrow of the text superbly with the dissonance and false relations of the beginning and middle sections, and by the soft, homophonic plea of “Jerusalem convertere” at the close. Similarly, no understanding of Latin is needed to grasp the meaning of William Byrd’s two-part motet Ne irascaris Domine / Civitas sancti tui; the music is heartbreakingly sad and mournful. The prima pars allows a moment or two of chromatic insistence on the text “Ecce respice” (“Behold, look upon us”) but immediately regrets its timorousness. As in Tallis’s Lamentations, a sudden shift to homophonic writing gives stylistic contrast and highlights the key thought: “Sion deserta facta est.” This is followed by one of Byrd’s great musical images: on the text “Jerusalem desolata est,” the five voices take turns wandering over the same musical terrain, never seeming to arrive; the bass in particular starts the same passage five times over before the final cadence. We are left with Byrd in the musical, theological, political desert. — Tom Crawford, September 2012 References: Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the Renaissance., Prentice Hall, 1976; Grove Music Online; Mark Yeary, “‘O bone Jesu’, Jesus antiphons, and late medieval devotion to the Holy Name”; www.medieval.org/emfaq TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS John Troulouffe: Nesciens mater Nesciens mater virgo virum peperit The virgin mother who knew not a man bore the Sine dolore Salvatorem saeculorum, Savior of the world; the virgin alone suckled the very Ipsum regem angelorum, King of the angels, her breasts were filled from Sola virgo lactabat heaven.
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