From: inr@eccles.caltech.edu (I. Neill Reid)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: re: Renaissance music misconceptions
Date: 24 Aug 92 00:52:00 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

From: elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)

>This thread seems to have gravitated to e-mail with the two other people
>involved.  I still maintain that the sheer size of a chorus should not

   Fine lets keep it going - I'll try to avoid circular reasoning henceforth

>stop it from singing Renaissance music well; if your 50+ voice choir can
>do justice to Bach's Lobet dem Herrn/Alleluja motet then it can likely
>handle Josquin or Monteverdi as well.  (In neither case will you want
>the members to simply sing as if there was only 1 or 3 on a part... 

 concerning `O bone Jesu' by Carver

>Sounds wonderful, but where will you find 11 good tenors who will
>tolerate each other's company? :-)  Presumably this motet is for male
>choir, with "tenor" including some alto lines, and the remaining 8
>being bass parts?  And what's an "Earthquake" mass?  Guess I'll find
>all of that out next week.

>--Noam D. Elkies (elkies@zariski.harvard.edu)

 First the facts (and these are, like many facts, interesting). O bone Jesu
is for 3 basses, 11 tenors, 3 altos and 2 sopranos - so 11 _real_ tenors -
the mildest, most co-operative and effacing of men... Like the Tallis, not
all of the choir is used all the time - there are extended sections of
melismatic (?) writing for 3-5 voices. It is published as part of vol. XV 
of music Brittanica (Scottish Music - 1500-1700)
together with another Carver mass (another L'homme Arme for 4 voices, and
the first Carver I heard - by Douglas Gifford and the St. Andrews
Renaissance Group), 3 other anonymous masses, numerous psalm settings 
from the reformed church and 30 or 40 songs. Most of these are anonymous,
since one of the unfortunate side-effects of the tremendous dislocation
of the Scottish Reformation was the destruction of many manuscripts
with Popish associations. (On the other hand, the Reformation was
responsible for realising Knox's dream of `a school in every parish', and
the consequent high standard of education (and high regard for education)
that (I think) still pervades Scottish life. No, I'm not (quite) a Scots
Nat.) 
 Anyway, the piece has actually been recorded twice - by the Taverner Consort
under Andrew Parrott (on EMI) with pieces by Taverner and Browne, and as
part of the recording of Carver's complete (surviving) works by Cappella
Nova on ASV. The latter includes the 10-part mass `Dum sacrum mysterium'
and the 5-part motet `Gaude flore virginali'. Of the two performances, the
Taverner is the more polished - the Cappella Nova less coherent, perhaps, as
a whole, but livelier in places. The music is easily the equal of any of
the main contemporary English composers, and (I think) at its
best holds its own against even Josquin (although it is more backward looking
in style). Carver seems to have survived until the 1560s, although the
details of his life (caught up in the chaos of first the regency of the
infant James V, the machinations of Mary of Guise and then the stramash
surrounding Mary QoS eogocentric reign) are not known.
 As to the Earthquake mass by Brumel, the work dates from before 1501 (so
it is slightly before early Carver) and is based on the cantis firmus of
the Easter antiphon `Et ecce terrae motus' (and, behold, the earth moved -
Matt. 28, 2). It was striking enough that Lassus prepared a copy for his
choir in Bavaria about 50 years after Brumel's death - I think that it is
this copy that is the best annotated of those surviving (there are some
eccelent notes on the piece in the Huelgas recording.) It has been
recorded twice - by the Huelgas ensemble (Sony) under Paul van Nevel and
by the Tallis Scholars (Gimmell) under Peter Phillips. The writing is
amazing - in the Gloria, in particular, you have here simple motifs
being passed from part to part that set up a sort of standing wave of
sound. Of the 2 performances, I prefer the Huelgas ensemble - the Tallis
Scholars are superb, but maybe just a trifle too pure and detached 
(this is the same reaction that accompanied the Dowland et al. performances
by the Consort of Musicke - initially a revelation, but then a realisation
that the music gained from more involvement - as the CoM have shown in their
later recordings.)

As to the matter in hand - that is, few voices versus many - I would
still argue that the 2-4 per part provides the most revealing musical
performances, with 2 per part being the optimum. The last eases 
the problems of blending, provides few enough voices for vocal agility
(both within a part and in reacting to other parts) but gives sufficient
flexibility in breathing that you can carry long phrases. These
convictions, I should point out, rest on only 6 years of actually trying
to sing this music, although rather longer of listening and reading. But
there are so many pieces which would suffer from the heaviness of a
large-scale approach - we're working on the Byrd 3-part mass at the moment
(2 per part) and, like the Palstrina Tenebrae Responsae, it has an
intimacy that would be blown away in a large-scale performance (and Byrd,
writing for the recusants of Elizabethan England, can't have expected a
large choir - even given ER Is tolerance).

Against this point of view there are the audible examples of the Palestrina
and Vittoria masses by David Hill (& Westminster of Winchester),
the Monteverdi choir (how many per part? and they are a pretty exceptional
example), and the various other chapel and cathedral choirs (although I
think these are at most 35 voices). And I suppose that since much of this
music was written for the resonant acoustic of spacious cathedrals,
the composers can't have expected too cleancut a performance - although
this wouldn't hold for smaller chapels. Even ~35 voices can produce 
static performances (Vittoria's Ave Maria sounds `wrong' to me in
the Hill performance after I've sung it with a smaller group at about
twice the speed). 

 But I'd rather hear somebody attempt the Missa Papae Marcelli, or the
Vittoria Requiem, or Taverner's Western Wynde Mass or Monteverdi's
Missa In Illo Tempore with 50+ voices than yet another boring run-through 
of the Mozart Requiem.

 Neill Reid   inr@eccles.caltech.edu
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical