THE RENAISSANCE

The unlocking of the European imagination, the breakaway from church dogma into the golden, bustling secularity of the Renaissance, had been under way throughout the fourteenth century. In 1295, when Marco Polo returned from his sojourn at the court of the Great Khan and talked of seeing stars unknown to the savants of Europe, he alienated the church fathers (who excommunicated him) but liberated

freer thinkers everywhere. In 1492, when Columbus, one of those free thinkers, happened upon other “unknown” worlds, he surprised imaginative people less than he whetted their appetites for more.

Gutenberg’s method of printing from movable type, perfected in the 1440s and 1450s, was put to good use in spreading the work of the philosophers, scientists, and literary giants of the secularizing movement we call Humanism. By 1543, when the Polish astronomer Copernicus demonstrated that instead of all worlds revolving around this one, our solar system was part of a universe governed by physical laws, his work could be grasped as a natural outgrowth of an era of discovery that humbled as well as thrilled the thinkers who led it.

People of small minds had little choice but to watch their world be turned, in more ways than one, upside down.

The best musicians were still the product, largely, of cathedral choir schools, where they passed their long apprenticeship—from matriculating as boy soprano to their engagement elsewhere as adult professionals—mastering the liturgy and its music by singing the whole of it year after year. What we think of as Renaissance style originated midway into the fifteenth century among composers of the Low Countries and northern France. Several generations of the leading composers were trained at the cathedral of Cambrai, in northernmost France. (Medieval Flanders, the region where French and Dutch cultures intermingle, consisted of this portion of northern France and the western part of the Low Countries abutting the North Sea. Its Germanic dialect, Flemish, is still today an official language of Belgium.)

At the time, these territories belonged to the dukes of Burgundy (Philip the Good, r. 1419–67; Charles the Bold, r. 1467–77), who lavished the wealth they accrued in trade with England on the fine arts. The retinues of these and similar nobles included a private chapel consisting of singers and players under the direction of the finest chapel master they could afford. Invariably this maItre de chapelle, or maestro di cappella, was a capable composer.

For instance, Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400–74), the best composer of the so-called Burgundian School, learned his trade at Cambrai,

returned there between various engagements in Italy, and at length retired to CambraL Advancing the late medieval manner of Machaut and his followers , Dufay composed with equal success both secular song (the French chanson) and Latin sacred music. In one famous miniature illustration he is pictured with the other celebrated chanson writer of the time, Gilles Binchois (c. 1400–60), an employee of Philip the Good. The poem that goes with the picture in the manuscript suggests that both of these men knew and sometimes imitated the work of their English counterparts, especially John Dunstable (d.

1453), musician to the Duke of Bedford, near Cambridge.

ILLUSTRATION: D^{UFAY AND} B^INCHOIS

The next generation, called the Franco-Flemish composers, begins with the work of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420–97), Flemish-born composer in the employ of the kings of France. Composing in the genres that had become customary—masses, motets, chansons—he asserted the principles of imitative counterpoint, text painting, and sonority that served as models for composers of the next century.

Ockeghem also composed the first attributed Requiem mass. His immediate successor was Josquin Desprez (c. 1440–1521), perhaps Ockeghem’s pupil and certainly his ardent admirer. Josquin’s work heads a large, splendid repertoire from the decades surrounding the turn of the century.

ILLUSTRATION: O^CKEGHEM (^WITHGLASSES) ^{ANDHISSINGERS}

However pious their schooling, the northerners were anything but immune to the explosion of secular power, learning, and above all wealth to be found in Italy. From the late 1400s on, the focus of the Renaissance shifts to Italy, primarily to the ducal courts of Florence, Milan, and Ferrara, and of course to the Vatican in Rome. With increasing frequency northern-trained composers made the long journey southward, serving dukes and princes and the pope, who had now returned permanently to Rome and fancied himself, not always

rightly, proprietor of the best musical establishment in the world.

Dufay held several posts in Italy; Ockeghem’s contemporary Jacob Obrecht went to Ferrara; and Josquin’s rival Heinrich Isaac served Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence and after his patron’s death went on to Vienna and Innsbruck. Composers in the employ of the great secular princes had little difficulty adapting their techniques on behalf of the worldly patrons of the times. Surrounded by important libraries, working alongside equally gifted poets and philosophers and architects, they were as anxious to live the modern life as anybody.

Mass, Motet, Madrigal. All three major genres of the high Renaissance were for voices, unaccompanied or with the participation of a few instrumentalists. Sacred practice centered on the multi-movement polyphonic mass and individual Latin motet. In secular music the early Renaissance interest in setting French love poetry led over the course of time to a genre that dominated the high Renaissance: the Italian madrigal.

Compositional technique of this period strives for the discovery of beauty through imitative polyphony. A point of imitation begins in one of the voices, is closely imitated in the shape and note values of successive entries by the other voices, and eventually reaches some form of cadence. The next point of imitation begins, usually with the next bit of text, and the movement is knitted from a succession of such phrases until all the text has been set. Throughout, the counterpoint created by the interacting voices must be circumspect;

dissonant intervals, for example, must be carefully prepared and properly resolved.

A great deal of Renaissance polyphony follows the medieval prece-dent of building a work around a preexisting melody in the tenor voice, often in very long notes, known as a cantus firmus. (The Josquin work treated next embraces one kind of cantus firmus.) In the cantus firmus mass, every movement makes reference to the

Examples of imitative polyphony

borrowed melody and the work takes its name from that melody.

Thus Missa Ave maris stella has the Gregorian chant “Ave maris stella” in the tenor, and Missa L’homme armé uses the secular song

“L’homme armé” (“The Armed Man”).

The word motet (from the French mot, “word”) originally indicated, as we saw earlier, polyphony with texted upper voices. Motets had quickly developed into a form of high and increasingly abstract art, where a large measure of the composer’s technique lay in dexterous solving of the almost mathematical problems at hand.

By the high Renaissance, the term motet was used more generally for shorter sacred pieces in Latin, mostly in four and five voices.

Motets might be sung in church or for state ceremonies, or at concerts for invited guests. Many were composed for specific events like weddings or visits of state. Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores, for example, is for the dedication of the Florence cathedral dome, the work of the architect Brunelleschi. In an ornate manuscript given to Henry VIII by the government of Florence, the concluding motet, Nil maius superi vident, heaps all manner of flattery on the English king over a tenor that reads (in Latin), “Henry, by the grace of God, King of the English.” The motet is probably by Philippe Verdelot (c. 1475–1552).

The manuscript, now in the Newberry Library in Chicago, was probably presented to Henry in 1527–28 by a Florentine ambassador sent to London to seek money and political alliance for his new republic.

“Nymphes des bois,” Josquin Desprez’s chanson-motet (so called because the words are in French—thus “chanson”—while motets are usually in Latin), laments the death of his worthy predecessor, Ockeghem.

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Johannes Ockeghem died in Tours in 1497 after a fine career that had begun at Antwerp Cathedral and continued in a series of excellent

appointments in France. His influence was strong among the Netherlandish composers who dominated the first decades of the sixteenth century. Josquin’s Déploration, for example, follows the precedent of Ockeghem himself, who had composed a rather similar lament on the death of Binchois.

Consider first the moving imagery in the poem by Jean Molinet.

Mythological forest voices and professional singers the world over are exhorted to exchange their ordinary songs for lamentation; the late Ockeghem was a true treasure (a pun, for he was treasurer of his mo-nastery) and master of his craft. Great is their sorrow to see him covered by earth. In the second part of the work, Ockeghem’s disciples are to drape themselves in mourning garments; they include Josquin himself along with the composers Antoine Brumel, Pierre de la Rue (i.e., Pierchon, little Pierre), and Loyset Compère. Having lost their

“good father” they weep bitter tears in bidding Ockeghem the farewell of the Requiem Mass itself: Requiescat in pace, Amen (“May he rest in peace, Amen”).

The tenor voice of the Déploration intones the chant from the beginning of the funeral mass:

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, Eternal rest grant unto them, 0 Lord, et lux perpetua luceat eis And perpetual light shine upon them.

Josquin, like Ockeghem, was a master of imitative practice. Look closely at the four lower voices in the opening measures. Not only is the tenor closely imitated by the bass three bars later, but the two voices notated here in the treble clef have the same relationship. The same note-against-note counterpoint that works for the two voices sounding in bars 1 through 3 works equally when the third and fourth voices enter. Thus the imitation is of voice pairs.

Meanwhile the superius—the voice on top, if you are looking at the full score—forms a tuneful melody. The phrase goes on to cadence on D, overlapping the start of the next phrase (”Chantres expers”). Here and throughout, the motet is distinguished by the graceful way the active voices move in to fill spaces left vacant when the others drop out.

Josquin’s setting of the text is transparent, so that the words of the poem could be well understood. One of the humanizing features of Josquin’s work is the way the expressive musical phrases mirror the meaning of the text. It is no accident that the superius rises noticeably in pitch for the words tant clères et haultaines (”very clear and high”), nor that the “gripping cries” that follow are so strongly set out in rhythm and reiterated pitch, decaying then into melismatic lamentation. But the most poetic effect occurs when, at the start of the second section (or secunda pars), the polyphonic interaction is replaced by four-part homophony (the tenor having momentarily

stopped), then the breathtaking falls of interlocking thirds, certain to symbolize tears.

The whole passage is then repeated, followed by a homophonic statement of Requiescat in pace (where the tenor returns), then an

“Amen” that falls dramatically by thirds again, to a hollow and quite melancholy cadence on the low A.

Even the notation is symbolic of death: Instead of the whole notes and half notes that were customary by that time, the copyist used note-values that could be written entirely in black. In Renaissance practice the music is not in score but in individual parts, and there are no bar lines. All the singers would gather around a single copy of the book—hence the large size—to read their respective parts, following (in this case) whole-note beats and subdividing them according to the meter signature, here duple. A modern edition puts these parts into score with familiar note shapes and, for the convenience of modem performers, adds bar lines and the necessary ties across the bar.

The performance is by the Ensemble Clement Janequin, a group founded to study and present this repertoire in what it believes to be modem approximations of original performance practice. The mem-bers are admired for their keen acuity of pitch and mastery of old pronunciations. They provide, too, the occasional sharp and flat that hones the cadence points and melodic peaks according to practices described by theorists of the time. Since these pitches didn’t exist in the theoretical gamut of pitches, they are called musica ficta—fictive music.

CHART FOR TRACK 6 | J^OSQUIN: D^{ÉPLORATION SUR LA MORT DE} J^OHANNES OCKEGHEM

Josquin Desprez (c. 1440–1521) is our first celebrity composer. We have a sense of the great esteem in which his works were held by the number of times they were copied in manuscript—a sure sign of musical value. The world at large was drawn to Josquin following the publication of his works, in his lifetime, by one Ottaviano Petrucci, music publisher of Venice.

ILLUSTRATION: P^ORTRAITOF J^OSQUIN D^ESPREZ

It was Petrucci’s epochal invention to print music from movable type. The process took two or three passes, one to print the staves and another to print the pitches, sometimes a third for the text. Music printing has seldom looked better than it did in his very first book, a 1501 collection of about a hundred secular pieces with heavy emphasis on Josquin. (Early books of printed music, incidentally, were a luxury item, more expensive than an ordinary scribal copy.

Production got cheaper, of course, as music publishing became the normal means circulation.) Petrucci went on to publish a great deal more Josquin, notably three books josquin Desprez of masses (1502, 1505, 1514), the first collections devoted to a single composer.

ILLUSTRATION: P^ETRUCCI’^{SPRINTEDMUSIC} (^{ONE VOICE}) ^OFACHANSONBY J^OSQUIN

We believe that Josquin’s career took him, before he was 20, to the Milan cathedral, thence to his long service with the Sforza family there and, in the retinue of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, to Rome (1484);

in Rome he became a member of the papal choir. He appears to have served the king of France, Louis XII, from the 1490s to past the turn of the century. In the spring of 1502 he became the highly paid maestro di cappella to Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara. Fleeing an outbreak of the plague in 1503 (he was replaced by Obrecht, who died from it in 1505), he went home to Condé-sur-l’Escaut, a few dozen kilometers from Cambrai, where he became affiliated with the local monastic order. At his death he had long been an extremely famous composer, and his posthumous reputation continued to gather. His work was admired by all the famous musicians, by the writers Castiglione and Rabelais, by Leonardo da Vinci (if Josquin is indeed the subject of Leonardo’s fine Portrait of Musician), and by Martin Luther, who preferred Josquin’s music to any other. All told, he left 18 masses, some 100 motets, several dozen secular vocal works, and a few instrumental pieces.

These works are firmly ascribed to him; a great deal more is credited him in dubious attributions.

Josquin seems to have had a healthy sense of his own worth.

Searching for a maestro di cappella for the Ferrarese court, Ercole d’Este’s agents quickly narrowed the choice to Josquin or his gifted contemporary Heinrich Isaac. One of the agents thought Isaac the better hire, finding him more prolific and of better disposition. And a good deal cheaper. “It’s true that Josquin composes better,” the agent wrote, “but he composes when he wants to and not when you want him to.”

Sacred music after Josquin, owing largely to his example, gradually abandoned the cantus firmus tenor and mathematical device in favor of the softer edges of free imitative polyphony. Equality of the voice parts was assumed, and the preferred sonorities resulted from alternating rich, increasingly triadic, consonances with carefully

handled dissonance. One revels in the sheer luxuriance of the sound and in what many consider the perfection of contrapuntal technique.

The masters of this last period of Renaissance sacred music were the Roman composer Giovanni da Palestrina (1525/26–94); the Spaniard Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548–1611, trained in Rome, perhaps by Palestrina); Orlando di Lasso (1532–94), maestro di cappella to the dukes of Bavaria at Munich; and the English composer William Byrd.

William Byrd (1543–1623), born almost exactly a century after Josquin, watched at close range the splendid yet turbulent age of Elizabeth 1. Born toward the end of Henry VIII’s reign, he became an organist at Lincoln cathedral and in due time a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, that is, the queen’s musicians. In 1575 he and Thomas Tallis, the other leading English composer of the era, were granted an exclusive royal patent for the printing and sale of music and music papers, which, even though it proved unprofitable, established Byrd’s centrality in English musical life. But Elizabeth I was an ardent Angli-can, and Byrd an unreformed Catholic. In increasingly dangerous times he quietly maintained his religion, eventually leaving London in order to be able to worship with a small congregation in the safety of a private chapel in the countryside. Byrd contributed greatly to the keyboard repertoire and secular song, but he is at his most polished and probably his most devout in his a cappella (unaccompanied) sacred music for the Catholic liturgy. This includes two books of polyphonic settings of the mass propers (Gradualia I, 1605; II, 1607) and masses for three, four, and five voices, all written after he left London. of the masses the first to be composed was doubtless the Mass in 4 Parts, probably in 1592–93.

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The last movement of Byrd’s mass is one of the most exquisitely shaped movements in the Renaissance literature. Byrd is sensitive both to the gentle image of the Lamb of God and to the poignancy of the imploring “miserere” and “dona nobis pacem.”

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Lamb of God, who takest away the Miserere nobis. sins of the world, Have mercy on us.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Lamb of God, who takest away the Miserere nobis. sins of the world, Have mercy on us.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Lamb of God, who takest away the Dona nobis pacem. sins of the world, Grant us peace.

The three verses are set in a single movement, in contrast to the Franco-Flemish preference for a short movement for each. The opening point of imitation is presented, with naive innocence, by the alto and soprano, beginning with the same motive that opened the earlier Kyrie and Gloria. Note how closely the soprano imitates the alto, breaking away only to reach the B cadence.♭

The first verse, then, is a duo, establishing a treble-dominated tex-ture over such an extended period that the near simultaneous entries

of the tenor and bass, when they finally happen, take your breath away with the resonance of the new sonority.

The second verse begins with a trio for tenor, bass, and soprano, this

The second verse begins with a trio for tenor, bass, and soprano, this