Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini, Guillaume DUFAY / Pro Arte Singers, Thomas Binkley
medieval.org
Focus 941
12.1991
Recital Hall, School of Music, Indiana University
11.1992, 11.1993, 6.1994
Creative Arts Auditorium, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
01 - Introitus (Fauxburdon) [1:54]
02 - KYRIE I (Polyphony) [1:37]
03 - Christe [1:00]
04 - Kyrie II [1:51]
05 - GLORIA (Polyphony) [2:10]
06 - Qui tollis [1:49]
Singers of Polyphony Cantus: Andrea Fullington, Katherine Shao, Amanda Simmons, Allison Zelles; Altus: N. Lincoln Hanks, Donald Livingston, Jay White; Tenor-Bassus: Bill Allred, Robert Dell, Peter Hoogenboom, Christian Müller-Bergh,
Eric Fenton Small, David Stattelman, Noel Werner
Singers of Chant
(Amanda Simmons, Precentor)
Karen Kness, Kelly Landerkin, Carolina Rodríguez, Marian Seibert,
Amanda Simmons, Susannah Teegarden, Zayra Vázquez, Allison Zelles;
Officers: Intonations: Zayra Vázquez Subdeacon: David Stattelman Deacon: David Meyer Celebrant: Christian Müller-Bergh
Soloists:
Graduale: Kelly Landerkin
Sequentia: Amanda Simmons, Kelly Landerkin
Guillaume
Du Fay, also known as Guillaume Dufay, (c.1400-1474) is regarded as the
foremost French composer of the early fifteenth century. He was a
widely travelled and educated cleric, having first studied and worked
in Italy, then later in what is now Switzerland and France. It was the
common practice for the composer to set the Ordinarium Missa in
polyphony, which was sung by a specially trained choir, while the
Proprium Missa was sung by the Schola Cantorum in plainsong. The
plainsong was sometimes sung in parts, improvised in a form of fauxbourdon
as the Introit is sung here. This ancient practice is the result of
mixed voices singing chant, usually impossible for mixed voices to sing
in unison, so the singing is done in octaves or some other intervals.
Experienced singers also employed improvised "supra librum" part
singing for the simple sake of beauty, as here in the sequence.
Polyphony required professional level singing, and employed improvised
ornamentation such as the puncti organi towards the end of the
Kyrie. Solistic chant was sung by trained choristers (boys), either
singly, in pairs, trios or quartets, depending upon the degree of
festivity. The liturgical duties of the officers (Subdeacon, Deacon and
Celebrant), who were very seldom singers, included song-like recitation
of special texts. The structure of the mass permitted optional
incremental music in the form of tropes or motets which served to
prevent silence when the actions extended beyond the duration of the
existing music and which served to heighten the theme of the service
and to provide points of special beauty. With this in mind we have
placed motets following the Sanctus and the Postcommunio.
Thomas Binkley
...
At
the time when Okeghem and Du Fay met for the first time, during the
signing of the treaty of Cleppé between Savoy and France in 1452,
Okeghem's most recent major work was his Missa Caput, and he
must have shown it then to Du Fay, probably together with the English
mass upon which it was based. Both Rob Wegman and myself have argued
that the English mass must have made a deep impression on Du Fay, and
that his own stunning Missa Se la face ay pale (recorded on FOCUS 934) was in many ways a response to what he heard in Caput. It is not unlikely that the many copies of Caput
that circulated in the continent lacked the immense troped Kyrie that
opens the work and thus Du Fay may have entreated Okeghem during their
visit to send him a copy of that movement. But then there is also the
matter of Du Fay's Missa Ecce Ancilla - Beata es Maria (to give
it its complete name since the work uses two cantus firmi in
succession). The piece is exceptional in Du Fay's production, and some
of the ways in which it is so may be explained by Okeghem's visit to
the aged master. To begin with, Du Fay at the outset cites the opening
of Okeghem's own Missa Ecce ancilla (but note that despite the similar
names the two masses are based upon different cantus firmi), albeit in
a slight variation, and then there is the matter of the written range
of the work. Every other of the Du Fay masses lies higher in terms of
the written range than does his Missa Ecce ancilla - Beata es Maria.
One may argue endlessly as to the meaning of the clef combinations in
fifteenth-century music. The system of indicating a transposition by
means of a given clef combination, known as chiavette, did not
evolve until a century later, and it invariably uses high clefs to
indicate a downward transposition. But in this mass Du Fay uses a set
of clefs that call for a lower range, a set of clefs that, if taken at
face value, places this mass squarely in the sound work of Okeghem's
music rather than in that inhabited by Du Fay's other cantus firmus
masses. We are surely dealing here with a complex and oblique reference
to Okeghem and his mass.
But apart from the apparent Okeghem-like low range Du Fay's mass could not be more different from that of Okeghem. Okeghem's Missa Ecce ancilla
is a large-scale and beautifully somber work, with swirling and
turbulent contrapuntal lines moving in such a low range that it is hard
to discern their detail. It has astonishing accelerations of the
surface motion at the end of several sections (particularly in the
Gloria), odd tonal non sequiturs within a movement such as the
transition from the Christe to the last Kyrie, and at least one
large-scale modal shift in that the Credo is in a different
transposition from the rest of the work. Du Fay's mass, in contrast is
the shortest and most compact of his late masses, and despite the lower
tessitura (in comparison to Du Fay's other masses) a work of uncommon
transparency and economy. Phrase structure, scoring, and tonal
organization all contribute to a sense of order and clarity in Du Fay's
work that resembles more his own Missa Se la face ay pale than Okeghem's putative model.