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Hyperion CDA 66944 — 1997
Helios CDH 55328 — 2009
1. Alleluya. Non vos relinquam orphanos [8:05]
Mass on Ascension Sunday
2. Alleluya. Dulce lignum, dulces clavos [8:02]
Mass on The Finding of the Holy Cross
3. Alleluya. Spiritus Sanctus procedens [7:14]
Matins on Sunday at Pentecost
4. Alleluya. Paraclitus Spiritus Sanctus [8:40]
Vespers on Thursday at Pentecost
5. Priusquam te formarem [8:44]
Mass on The Nativity of St John the Bapstist
6. Alleluya. Inter natos mulierum [8:07]
Second Vespers on The Nativity of St John the Bapstist
7. Viderunt omnes fines terre [8:13]
Mass on Christmas Day
8. Alleluya. Dies sanctificatus illuxit nobis [6:32]
Matins on Christmas Day
9. Alleluya. Pascha nostrum immolatus est [6:07]
from Mass and Vespers on Easter Day
Red Byrd
John Potter • Richard Wistreich
Cappella Amsterdam
Recorded on 4, 5 December 1996
Recording Engineer JULIAN MILLARD
Recording Producer MARK BROWN
Design TERRY SHANNON
Executive Producers JOANNA GAMBLE, NICK FLOWER
℗ & © Hyperion Recolds Ltd, London, MCMXCVII
Front illustration: Medieval sculptures, Mirepoix, France
Simon Marsden / The Marsden Archive
Red
Byrd believes that the point of singing the music of the past is to
illuminate the present. Its constant members are John Potter and Richard
Wistreich, who are joined by other singers and instrumentalists with a
strong grounding in early music to explore song old and new.
Its
first concert, in the Musikfest Bremen in 1989, ranged from Monteverdi
to Frank Martin and John Paul Jones, and in 1990/1 it toured the United
Kingdom on both the early and contemporary music networks. Since then it
has visited Canada, Ireland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany,
Austria, Italy and Finland. In 1993 it gave the first performance of
Ivan Moody's Passion and Resurrection with the Estonian
Philharmonic Chamber Choir at the Tampere International Choir Festival,
which had commissioned the work. It gave it again with the Cappella
Amsterdam at the Musica Sacra Festival, Maastricht, and these forces
have recorded it for Hyperion (CDA66999), adding to the group's
recordings of music by Monteverdi, Blow and Purcell with the Parley of
Instruments. Broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 have ranged from Leonin via
Palestrina, Whythorne and Purcell to the first performance of Thea
Musgrave's Wild Winter. John Potter's Vocal Authority is
published by Cambridge University Press; Richard Wistreich is professor
of singing at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Trossingen; both are
contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Singing.
MAGISTER LEONINUS
Sacred Music from 12th-Century Paris
An
account of late twelfth-century polyphony was first written a hundred
years after the event by a monk who may have come from Bury St Edmunds;
history has not entrusted us with his name and he is usually referred to
by the title he received when his treatise was first published in the
nineteenth century — Anonymous IV. Anonymous as he was, he tells us about
two of the most important composers of the fifty years either side of
1200: the magistri Leoninus and Perotinus. Leoninus, we are told,
wrote a cycle of two-part settings of the most important chants in the
liturgical year—Christmas, Easter, Assumption and other feasts; this
cycle was called the Magnus liber organi (‘The great book of organum’).
Perotinus and his contemporaries played an important role in the
careful recasting and elaboration of this repertory. According to the
monk from Bury St Edmunds, Perotinus either shortened or edited
(interpretations vary) Leoninus’ great book of organum;
long sections of almost improvisatory scope were rewritten according to the tighter principles of discant
composition that Perotinus himself may have contributed to codifying.
Both Leoninus and Perotinus worked at the Cathedral Church of Notre Dame
de Paris.; while little is conclusively known about the biography of
Perotinus, recent fashion has inclined to identify Leoninus with Leo, a
canon of Notre Dame in later life and, incidentally, an author of
neo-Ovidian homoerotic poetry.
Organa of the type that make up Leoninus’ Magnus liber organi
are polyphonic settings of plainsong. The original chants employ two
musical styles: the solo sections are elaborately melismatic and
contrast with the simpler, more syllabic, sections sung by the schola.
It is the melismatic solo sections of the chant that are set
polyphonically. The result is that a performance of organum involves polyphony and plainsong.
Viderunt omnes and Priusquam te formarem
are both Graduals and have the overall structure Respond—Verse—Respond.
Within each of these main sections are settings of both solo and choral
chants; the Respond consists of polyphony followed by the remainder of
the chant, and the same pattern is followed in the Verse, and of course
in the return of the Respond. Usually, the second Respond is simply a
repeat of the first one, as in the case of Priusquam te formarem. However, in the case of Viderunt,
the second Respond is not only composed anew but a third setting is
also preserved, as is a second setting of the Verse. On major feasts,
when the Gradual was followed by an Alleluya, the repeat of the Respond
was usually omitted. In Paris around 1200, however, the practice was
different.
Leoninus’ organa dupla of the Magnus liber organi
took the plainsong and did one of two things with it: for the more
syllabic sections of the chant that he set, he laid out the lowest part
(the tenor) in long notes and wrote highly elaborate, rhapsodic lines
above it (the duplum); this style of music was called organum per se
(medieval terms vary, and theorists took a pedantic pleasure in pointing out
the complexities of usage for a term — organum — that
could mean a complete piece or a generic style or, as here, a
subsection). Alternatively, he took the long melismas of the chant and
organized them into repeating rhythmic cells and wrote a correspondingly
tight rhythmic duplum above it. The rhythmic organization of this procedure
gave rise to what are called the rhythmic modes (this style was called discantus).
Both types of music exist within the same composition; the sections
based on highly melismatic chants that use the rhythmic modes are called
clausulae when they are given discrete, self-contained forms.
The resulting structure of alternations of plainsong, organum per se
and discantus can be illustrated by a transcription of the text of Alleluya. V· Non vos relinquam.
Alleluya. Alleluya. V· Non vos relinquam orphanos: vado,
et venio ad vos, et gaudebit cor vestrum. Alleluya.
In this transcription, those parts of the text that are left in plainsong are given in roman type,
those in organum per se in italics and passages in discantus are given in underescored italics.
The use of a full-blown clausula in the Alleluya section of the piece is a rarity;
the only other clausula in the composition sets the plainsong melisma on the words ‘et gaudebit’. All the remaining sections in discantus
(settings of the plainsong on the words ‘relin[quam]’, ‘orphanos
va[do], et ven[io]’ are just that: brief digressions into fully measured
note-against-note music in the context of the prevailing organum per se,
in which the composer has not attempted to create any sense of
structural order to the music in the same way that he does in the clausulae.
With the exception of including a clausula in its opening section,
Alleluya. V· Non vos relinquam is fairly typical of all Alleluyas in the Magnus liber organi.
Graduals behave slightly differently. The outline of the Gradual Viderunt omnes may be compared with the
Alleluya. V· Non vos relinquam just discussed:
R· Viderunt omnes fines terre salutare Dei nostri: jubilate Deo omnis terra.
V· Notum fecit Dominus salutare suum: ante conspectum gentium revelavit iusticiam suam.
R· Viderunt omnes fines terre salutare Dei nostri: jubilate Deo omnis terra.
Perhaps
the most striking thing about this piece, and Graduals in general, is
that most of the first section (the Respond) is left in plainsong. There
is only one true clausula in the composition and that is on the word ‘Do[minus]’ in the Verse.
The other sections in discant are short and do not establish the same sorts of phrase structures and patterns.
This
recording includes compositions for the main feasts from the first part
of the liturgical year. Although the year starts at the beginning of
Advent, the first major feast is Christmas; Viderunt omnes and Alleluya. V· Dies santificatus
would have been the musical centrepieces of the third Mass on Christmas
Day in the last quarter of the twelfth century. The liturgy of Notre
Dame was exceptionally generous to Easter, and several Alleluyas that
are unique to Paris were set by Leoninus; Red Byrd sing the best known
of these, Alleluya. V· Pascha nostrum (the Alleluya for Easter Day).
They also perform the two Alleluyas that survive for Pentecost (Spiritus Sanctus and Paraclitus Spiritus Sanctus),
the second of the two Alleluyas for Ascension (Non vos relinquam),
the only music for the Feast of the Holy Cross (3 May), and all the
music for the Feast of St John the Baptist (24 June). The rest of the
liturgical year represented by the Magnus fiber organi includes a
long series of works for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and
the Common of Saints, Martyrs, Bishops and Virgins.
Performing the duplum lines in organum per se
is a skill that is difficult to regain at the end of the twentieth
century. The music notated in the original manuscripts gives a mixture
of information: some idea of what the composer’s overall structure might
have been, and an idea of at least one (and probably more than one)
performer’s view of the music. And it has to be remembered that a
‘performer;s view’ of this music would almost certainly have entailed
changes to pitch and rhythm, and a sense of what a thirteenth-century
editor would have done in trying to copy down and render consistent a
wide range of material. So these sections which, in their floridity,
resemble late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century coloratura vocal
lines, differ in that they are not just blueprints to be ornamented;
they are blueprints that have already been partially ornamented, and the
singer of the duplum part treads a very careful path between the
slavish duplication of a medieval performer’s view of the work and the
complete recreation of Leoninus’ music.
It used to be thought that the sustained notes in organum duplum
were to be held relentlessly: a challenge to breath control and the
sanity of the singer taking the part. Re-readings of thirteenth-century
theory suggest that the tenor is responsible for contributing with great
subtlety to the texture of the work by breaking the sound, at the same
time as one or more of the upper voices, and this is the procedure that
is employed here.
The editions of the music used in this
recording are taken from the manuscripts Florence, Biblioteca
Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1 (polyphony) and Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, fonds latin 1112 (plainsong). The music will appear
in volume 3 of Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, 7 vols (Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1997).
MARK EVERIST ©1997
