CANTICUM NOVUM. ON SACRED MUSIC AND LITURGY

Danish Yearbook of Musicology 42, 2018

In the middle of the fifteenth century a principal concern of the new sacred genre, the cyclic cantus firmus mass, was the question of musical and liturgical unity. How to balance the quest for unity and the wish for diversty in musical expression or varietas, which Tinctoris advised in his teachings of counterpoint. I take a closer look at an anonymous mass dating from the decade just after 1450, the Missa Sine nomine in MS Cappella Sistina 14, in which the composer was intensely involved with the problem of unity, so involved that he – according to our ideas about music – has focused on ‘unity’ to such a degree that it became rather to the detriment of ‘diversity’. The mass was highly regarded in its time, and this fact puts our aesthetic understanding of the period’s music to test. In addition to the classical analysis of how such a cantus firmus mass is structured as a musical architecture transmitted in writing, we have to ponder how it served as a sounding reality, and how it may have related to the little we know about the musical practices of the period.

Among the books, manuscripts, and printed music donated to Boston University by the renowned Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon is a manuscript collection of music for the Ordinary of the Mass. The volume is a compendium, most likely from the Veneto, created in the mid-eighteenth century by extracting pages from three manuscripts copied earlier in the century or late in the previous century. The four cantus-fractus Ordinary cycles that introduce the volume (presumably contemporaneous with its creation) and most of the sixteen cantus-fractus Credos seem to be unica. The compendium assembles a practical repertory of monophonic Ordinary chants in plainsong and cantus fractus for the celebration of Mass in a parish church or a religious community. Rubrical notes added to the manuscript prescribe liturgical assignments, specify starting pitches that frequently signal transposition, and call for the participation of the organ, either in alternation with the choir or as accompaniment. The compendium not only augments the known repertoire of cantus-fractus melodies and chants for the Ordinary of the Mass, but it also provides insights into the performance style of chant in eighteenth-century Italy.

TroJa, 2012

Who sings the cantus? Children as performers of secular music in the early modern period Sometime around 1488, the poet Angelo Poliziano wrote from Rome (in Latin) to the philosopher Pico della Mirandola about a banquet he had attended given by the nobleman, Paolo Orsini, during which the guests were entertained by the host's 11 year-old son, Fabio: No sooner were we seated at the table than [Fabio] was ordered to sing, t o-gether with some other experts, certain songs which are put into writing with those little signs of music and immediately he filled our ears, or rather our hearts, with a voice so sweet, that as for myself (I do not know about the others), I was almost transported out of my sense and was touched beyond doubt by the unspoken feeling of an altogether divine pleasure. 1 This famous letter continues with an even more ecstatic account of Fabio's solo rendition of a self-composed monody on a heroic theme that followed his performance in the ensemble songs, in which Poliziano praised the boy's perfect oratorical style of delivery, likening him to the great Roman actor, Roscius. 2 Setting aside for a moment Poliziano's rather self-conscious citation 1 As cited in Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge, 1982), p. 36. (»Vt ergo discubuimus, canere quaedam iussus notata Musicis accentiunculis carmina simul cum peritis alijs statim suauißima quadam uoce sic in aures nostras illapsus, imò verò in praecordia est, ut me quidem (caeteros nescio) penè extra me rapuerit, certè sensu tacito diuinae prorsus cuiusdam uoluptatis affecerit.« Angeli Politiani operum: Epistolarium libros XII. ac Miscellaneorum Centuriam I. complectens, Paris: Sébastien Gryphius, 1550, p. 351). 2 Ibid.: »He then performed an heroic song which he had himself recently composed in praise of our own Piero dei Medici … His voice was not entirely that of someone reading, nor entirely that of someone singing: both could be heard, and yet neither separated one from the other: it was, in any case, even or modulated, and now restrained, now calm and now vehement, now slowing down and now quickening its pace, but always it was precise, always clear and always pleasant; and his gestures were not indifferent or sluggish , but not posturing or affected either. You might have thought that an adolescent Roscius was acting on the stage.« (»Pronuntiauit heroicum deinde carmen, quod ipsemet nuper in Petri Medicis … Vox ipsa nec quasi legentis, nec quasi canentis, sed in qua tamen utrunq[ue] sentires, neutrum discerneres: uariè tamen prout locus posceret, aut aequalis, aut inflexa, nunc distincta, nunc perpetua, nunc sublata, nunc deducta, nu[n]c remissa, nunc contenta nunc lenta, nunc incitata, semper emendata, semper clara, semper dulcis, gestus non otio

Partecipazione al convegno "Music and Worship" con un contributo dal titolo "Giacomo Carissimi’s Sacri Concerti a due, tre, quattro e cinque voci: the case of the motet “Exsulta gaude filia Sion”

Monastic Musicians, 2015

What makes sacred music to be a fitting expression of man's worship and devotion for God? Are there principles interior to the science of music by which it can judge its own sacredness, or does it depend upon something external, such as the theology of liturgy, by which it is determined? Joseph Swain argues that a theology of the liturgy is insufficient to ground a theory of liturgical music. On the other hand, Benedict the XVI, in consonance with the Magisterial tradition of the Church, states that liturgical music must be subservient to and grounded in the liturgy and that liturgical theology is more than sufficient to ground liturgical music. Which of these two positions is correct? In this essay I would like to argue that sacred music, if it is going to retain its nature as leading man from the mundane to his final goal of union with God, must be subservient to and determined by the liturgy. In order to see this we must investigate what are the liturgical principles that determine and guide liturgical music. By understanding the root of the problem that has infected liturgy and liturgical music, we will be better able to understand on what principles a new theory of liturgical music must be based. Swain argues that one of the root causes of the post-conciliar depression in liturgical music is the surfeit of liturgical principles that are nevertheless hopelessly integrated. It is apparent that this is indeed a problem. However, it seems perhaps more correct to say that this is rather the symptom of a deeper underlying problem. The present confusion in liturgical principles seems to stem from relying too heavily on the council document Sacrosanctum Concilium as the only source for the first principles of liturgy. This document gives some very salutary indications regarding the general nature of liturgical music and yet, because of the great ambiguities that it and other of the documents from Vatican II contain, they do not serve very well as a unique source for clearly defined principles. On the one hand, Sacrosanctum Concilium suggests that sacred music needs to be closely connected to the liturgical action, that it should foster unity of minds and confer greater solemnity upon the sacred rites, also that Gregorian chant in particular should be given pride of place in the liturgy as being proper to it. But this same document also states that new compositions should have 'the qualities proper to genuine sacred music… providing also for the needs of small choirs and for the active participation of the entire assembly of the faithful.' If one takes 'active participation' in a physically external manner, thus meaning that the laity should be able to sing out all the parts of the mass, then it would seem to contradict the earlier principle of making Gregorian chant the centerpiece of the liturgy. Certain aspects of plain chant are simply too difficult to be sung