Stile Antico - The Friends of Chamber Music

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One of the most original musical voices of his generation, Nicolas Gombert was a Netherlander who, like so many musicians from the Low Countries, was employed by the Spanish Royal Chapel. Sadly he is most often remembered for having violated a young boy, for which he was sentenced to the galleys for several years, in exile on the high seas. Through his exceptional skills as a composer, he earned an early pardon from the Emperor and received a benefice that allowed him to end his days in peace. It is believed that his cycle of Magnificat settings helped him regain the Emperor’s favor. If this account is true, Gombert’s work can be placed within a few years of Ego flos campi, based on the Song of Songs by Jacobus Clemens non Papa, an equally masterful work, though one of a wholly different character. While the unfolding of Gombert’s counterpoint lends his music a compelling sense of forward movement, the static harmony of Clemens’ motet does not stray far from the warm, comforting tonic chord -- combined with a rich and intricate, yet remarkably unfussy seven-part texture -- that creates its opulent beauty. This text had a particular meaning for Clemens. He seems to have written his setting for the Marian Brotherhood in’s-Hertogenbosch, where he worked briefly in 1550. The words of the Brotherhood’s motto, sicut lilium inter spinas (as a lily among thorns), are used in the text. He highlights these words by setting them homophonically three times, in contrast to the surrounding seven-part counterpoint. Orlandus Lassus received his earliest training in his native Low Countries. By his early teens he had moved with his patron Ferrante Gonzaga to Mantua, then with other patrons to Milan, Naples and Rome. In 1556 he arrived in Munich, where he stayed for the rest of his life. As is common with later Renaissance works, his setting of Veni, dilecte mi displays a dynamic use of harmony to express the sense of the text. Orlandus stops just short of the advanced, almost experimental harmonic progressions of his late works. He uses sequential writing and experimentation with the cycle of fifths (techniques which later become a staple of the Baroque musical language) in order to illustrate the meaning of the text. The sequence gives us a sense of “journeying through the keys” as the two lovers set out into the fields. When it comes to a sheer sense of drama and emotive affect, the distinctive music of William Byrd is hard to beat, and especially the motets from the Cantiones program notes Sacrae of 1589/91. These two collections of Latin motets were undoubtedly published with the recusant Catholic community (those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England) in mind. It is therefore hard not to hear these two Advent motets (both from the 1589 book) as being written with a specific aim of galvanizing and encouraging Byrd’s fellow persecuted Catholics. The most dramatic is “Vigilate,” in which we hear the arresting crowing of the cock and the lethargic believer being lulled to sleep at the wrong moment, while the opening words of warning are set with apposite severity. Similar techniques are at work in “Laetentur coeli,” where the florid melismata (a passage of several notes sung to one syllable) of the heavenly choirs contrasts with a more raucous and chaotic response from the earth. The mountains rejoice in a statuesque, “mountain-shaped” point of imitation (a steep, regular ascent followed by a craggy descent), while “his humble people” are portrayed with unassuming syllabic counterpoint and somewhat gracious harmonic inflections. Byrd’s music owes much to that of his friend and teacher, Thomas Tallis, whose setting of “O sacrum convivium” comes from a volume of Cantiones published jointly by the two composers in 1575 under an exclusive royal license. We may imagine that Queen Elizabeth hoped the composition would get European circulation and raise England’s music profile abroad, for which the choice of Latin texts would be essential. Even considering this, “O sacrum convivium” is a strikingly Catholic piece, with its use of a Thomas Aquinas text from the liturgy of Corpus Christi (a feast outlawed by the English Prayer Book) with strong, if not explicit, overtones of transubstantiation. While it is not known whether “O sacrum convivium” was ever used liturgically in its published version, it is one of Tallis’ finest creations. The publication of the work in contemporary instrumental and English-texted versions (more appropriate for Church of England services) is evidence that the music was held in high regard. The work’s genius lies in how the spiritual intensity of the text is realized. Its cadences provide an inexorable sense of looking-forward. The work’s close-knit, five-part texture; its masterful use of rising sequences; and its skilful control of tessitura bring the work to a staggering emotional apex, in no way diminished by repetition (following the ABB form, common in English music at the time). 37 th season 2012-13 97
program notes If “O sacrum convivium” inhabits a Catholic musical world, the opposite is true of Tallis’ Eight Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, of which “Why fum’th in fight” (immortalized in Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis) is one of the most famous. The style of these metrical psalm settings, designed for domestic devotional use, is intentionally simple, allowing for easy amateur performance. John Sheppard, a contemporary of Tallis, was Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College, Oxford, before leaving to join Tallis as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1548. During the 1550s he was a key figure in the resurgence of old-style, Latin polyphony during the country’s brief return to Catholicism under Mary I, producing some of the decade’s finest music. Less survives of his English-texted music (dating from the reign of Edward VI), which is less impressively crafted than Tallis’ music. The finest of his English pieces is his setting of the Lord’s Prayer. We should be grateful for its survival since only the tenor part survives, only in one source. Fortunately, it appears in another manuscript as an untexted work for viols, and it may indeed have started life in this form. As with Tallis’ “O sacrum convivium”, its survival in two different forms attests to the work’s popularity at the time. Thomas Tomkins and Orlando Gibbons were the natural successors to Tallis and Byrd in the Chapel Royal. Tomkins’ anthem “O Praise the Lord” is a sumptuous feast of twelve-part polyphony. Passages of intricate counterpoint exist alongside antiphonal effects where the parts split into groups and sing phrases alternately, coming together at moments of particular intensity typical of the continental polychoral motets of the period. The work appears in Musica Deo Sacra, a collection of Tomkins’ sacred work, published posthumously by his son Nathaniel in 1668. Of the two composers, Gibbons was the musician of greater stature, and his sudden, early death robbed the English musical world of its most noted composer and organist (“the finest finger of the age”, in the words of one contemporary). His music, though not cutting edge compared to the new Baroque fashions that were quickly taking over Europe, was nonetheless innovative, harmonically daring and technically virtuosic. The anthem “I am the Resurrection and the Life” finds him in surprisingly austere mood. It is a backward-looking piece, although not without charm and nobility. The style is comparable in many ways with the English the friends of chamber music | the intimate voice of classical music anthems of his predecessors Tallis and Byrd, though its textural and motivic eclecticism places it firmly in the seventeenth century. The Reformation compelled English composers to engage with their texts with a new clarity and directness, while similar, though gentler, reforms were rapidly spreading throughout Catholic Europe following the Council of Trent in the 1560s. One of the compositional directives issued by the Church at this time was to limit melismatic settings of texts or complex polyphony. Because Palestrina was based in Rome and closer to the papacy, he was quick to respond to the changing needs of the Church. Now discredited is the well-known legend that his work Missa Papae Marcelli of 1562 was written to demonstrate to the Council that there was no need for a ban on polyphony. His jubilant motet Exsultate Deo demonstrates just the sort of dynamic response to the text that would have been desired. Its largely syllabic text setting (one note to each syllable) lends textual clarity, while its running scales and fanfare-like rhythms are wholly in keeping with the festive nature of the text and its exhortation to “blow the trumpet in the new moon.” Comparable in some ways to Palestrina’s work, though with its own uniquely Spanish intensity, is the motet Hortus conclusus by the lesser-known Andalusian composer Rodrigo de Ceballos. Although Ceballos spent his career in southern Spain, his music was widely disseminated throughout Spain and Latin America. Hortus conclusus, scored for only four parts, maintains a riveting style and emotional intensity, often governed by masterful control of phrasing and tessitura (the range in which a piece of music lies) all lending the work a fervently devotional quality. Representing the next generation of Spanish composers is Sebastián de Vivanco’s thrilling setting of the text of the Song of Songs, Veni, dilecte mi. (The other work on this program that is based on the Song of Songs is Clemens’ Ego flos campi.) This polychoral setting, with its antiphonal writing, heralds the advent of the early Baroque – indeed, one could almost envisage the piece performed with basso continuo, cornets and trombones. Vivanco brings out the rhetorical and sensual qualities of the text through his distinctive control of texture and harmony, as well as the use of striking contrasts between slow and fast passages, which thrillingly convey the heady excitement of the text.
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Stile Antico - The Friends of Chamber Music

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