King Solomon’s Singers present: Cathedrals and Attic Rooms: English Catholic Music From 1400-1600.

Saturday, September 22, 8PMSt. 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 moreso 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 Sine dolore Salvatorem saeculorum, Ipsum regem angelorum, Sola virgo lactabat Ubere de caelo pleno.

The virgin mother who knew not a man bore the Savior of the world; the virgin alone suckled the very King of the angels, her breasts were filled from heaven.

John Dunstable: Quam pulchra es

Quam pulchra es et quam decora,Carissima in deliciis.

Statura tua assimilata est palmaeEt ubera tua botris.

Caput tuum ut Carmelus,

Collum tuum sicut turris eburnea.

Veni, dilecte mi,Egrediamur in agrum,

Videamus si florent fructus parturiunt,Si floruerunt mala Punica.Ibi dabo tibi ubera mea.

How fair and how pleasant art thou,O love, for delights!

This thy stature is like to a palm tree,And thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

Thine head upon thee is like Carmel.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.

Come, my beloved,Let us go forth into the field.

Let us see whether the tender grape appear,And the pomegranates bud forth:There I will give thee my loves.

John Plummer: Anna mater matris Christi

Anna mater matris Christi, nos pie considera, que Marie meruisti propinare ubera. O quam digne veneraris ab humano germine, que Mariam mundo paris magno Dei munere.

Nam tu confers spem medele sacro puerperio; esto memor clientele huius in exilio.

Anna felix ascendisti supra cuncta sidera; tu in hora mortis tristinos ab hoste libera. Sic matrona singularis digneris succurrere, extans mater salutaris, fac nos Christo vivere.

Amen.

Anne, mother of Christ’s mother, look with pity upon us, thou who wast found worthy to give Mary the breast. Oh how worthily thou art worshipped by the human race, who bearest Mary for the world by the mighty gift of God.

For thou bringest the hope of remedy by thy holy childbearing; be mindful of these thy dependents in exile.

Blessed Anne, thou didst ascend above all the stars; do thou in our grievous hour of death free us from the enemy. Thus, matchless matron, mayst thou deign to help us, being the mother who brought salvation, make us live to Christ.

Amen.

Robert Fayrfax: Magnificat super “O bone Jesu”

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.

Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae: ecce enim ex hoc beatem me dicent omnes generationes.

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen eius.

Et misericordia eius in progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

Fecit potentiam in brachio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.

Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes.

Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordatus misericordiae suae.

Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eus in saecula.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

My soul doth magnify the Lord:

and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him: throughout all generations

He hath showed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel:

as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen

William Horwud: Gaude flore virginali

Gaude flore virginali, honoreque speciali, transcendens splendiferum angelorum principatum, et sanctorum decoratum dignitate numerum.

Gaude sponsa cara Dei, Nam ut clara lux diei solis datur lumine, sic tu facis orbem vere tuae pacis resplendere lucis plenitudine.

Gaude splendens vas virtutum cuius pendens est ad nutum tota caeli curia. Te benignam et felicem Jesu dignam genitricem veneratur in gloria.

Gaude nexu voluntatis et amplexu caritatis iuncta sic altissimo,ut ad votum consequaris quicquid virgo postularis a Jesu dulcissimo.

Gaude mater miserorum quia pater saeculorum dabit te colentibuscongruentem hic mercedem et felicem poli sedem regnis in caelestibus.

Gaude virgo mater Christi quia sola meruisti, o virgo piissima,esse tantae dignitatis quod sis sanctae trinitatis sessioni proxima.

Gaude virgo mater pura certa manens et secura quod haec septem gaudiaNon cessabunt nec decrescent sed durabunt et florescent per aeterna saecula.

Amen.

Rejoice, who, in the flower of your maindenhood, and in the special honour due to you, surpass all the shining hosts of angels, and with the decorated company of saints, art worthy to be numbered.

Rejoice, beloved spouse of God, for as the clear light of day shines forth in the sun’s rays, so truly do you make the Earth brilliant with the fullness of the light of your peace.

Rejoice, radiant vessel of goodness, on whose assent depends all the government of heaven: you the kind, blessed, worthy mother of Jesus they venerate in glory.

Rejoice that you are so united in the bond of will and the embrace of love with the most high, that you obtain the promise of whatvever virgin prayer you make to your sweet Jesus.

Rejoice, mother of the poor, that the father of all ages will grant to all who honour you a fitting reward here on Earth and a blessed place on high in the kingdom of heaven.

Rejoice, virgin mother of Christ, that you alone were counted worthy, o most dutiful maiden, to enjoy the great honour of taking the place next to the holy trinity.

Rejoice, who as pure virgin and mother, remain ever sure and secure, that these seven joys will not cease or diminish but will endure and flourish through eternal ages.

Amen.

Thomas Tallis: Lamentations I

Incipit lamentatio Ieremiae prophetae:

Aleph.

Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo: facta est quasi vidua domina gentium, princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo.

Beth.

Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae eius in maxillis eius: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris eius: omnes amici eius spreverunt eam, et facti sunt ei inimici.

Ierusalem, Ierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.

Here beginneth the lamentation of Jeremiah the prophet:

Aleph.

How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

Beth.

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks; among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God.

William Byrd: Ne irascaris, Domine / Civitas sancti tui

Ne irascaris Domine satis,et ne ultra memineris iniquitatis nostrae.Ecce respice populus tuus omnes nos.

Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta.Sion deserta facta est,Jerusalem desolata est.

Be not angry, O Lord,and remember our iniquity no more.Behold, we are all your people.

Your holy city has become a wilderness.Zion has become a wilderness,Jerusalem has been made desolate.

PERFORMERS

Heather AhrenholzWill BouvelMichael ByrleyTom Crawford

Matthew DeanTamara Ghattas Joseph HubbardJoe Labozetta

Amy MantroneJessica MelgerEric MirandaKeith Murphy

Peter OlsonBenjamin RiveraStephanie Sheffield

ABOUT THE ENSEMBLE

And the servants also of Huram, and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought algum trees and precious stones. And the king made of the algum trees terraces to the house of the LORD, and to the king’s palace, and harps

and psalteries for singers; and there were none such seen before in the land of Judah. (2 Chronicles 9:10–11)

Founded in 2010, King Solomon’s Singers is an ensemble dedicated to the performance of Renaissance polyphony and chant. The members of the ensemble are professional and semi-professional singers from the Chicago area—members of ensembles such as Chicago Chorale, Schola Antiqua of Chicago, The Oriana Singers, The Chicago Early Music Consort, Lyric Opera Chorus, and Chicago a cappella—who share a love of this particular repertoire. For more information, visit our website at http://www.king-solomons-singers.org/ or find us on Facebook.

SPECIAL THANKS

King Solomon’s Singers wish to thank St. Josaphat Church, St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, and The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts for providing rehearsal space; Fred Grier and Sara Leginsky for their help with concert logistics; and especially Paul Nicholson, Patrick Sinozich, and all the clergy and staff of St. Clement for hosting us in their wonderful space.