75TH SE

OF CONC ERE

FEBRUARY 12, 2017 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Blue Heron. Photo by Liz Linder

2 • National Gallery of Art

PROGRAM

12:00 and 2:00 • West Building, West Garden Court

Blue Heron

Martin Near and Laura Pudwell, cantus

Michael Barrett, Owen McIntosh, Jason McStoots, and Aaron Sheeha

tenor and contratenor

Paul Guttry and Sumner Thompson, bassus

Scott Metcalfe, vielle, director

Music by Du Fay and Binchois for Florence and the Medici

Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397-1474)

"Salve flos Tusce gentis”

"Vos nunc Etrusce"

"Viri mendaces”

Gilles Binchois (c. 1400-1460)

"Pour prison"

"Margarite fleur de valeur"

"Mon cuer chante joyeusement"

Guillaume Du Fay

Mirandas parit

Gilles Binchois 

"Seule esgaree"

"Votre tresdoulx regart"

"Dueil angoisseus"

"Files a marier"

Music for the Dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore, March 25,1436 

Guillaume Du Fay

"Nuper almos rose flores" (sequence of the Mass for the Dedication)

Guillaume Du Fay

'Nuper rosarum flores" (isorhythmic motet)
The Musicians

Blue Heron has been acclaimed by the Boston Globe as "one of the Boston music community's

indispensables" and hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker for its "expressive intensity." Committed to vivid live performance informed and enhanced by the study of original source 

materials and historical performance practices, Blue Heron ranges over a wide repertoire,

from plainchant to new music, with particular specialties in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish

and early sixteenth-century English polyphony. Blue Heron's first CD, featuring music by

Guillaume Du Fay, was released in 2007. In 2010, the ensemble inaugurated a five-CD series,

Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, including many world premiere recordings of works

copied about 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral; four discs have been released to date and the 

fifth is due out in the spring of 2017. Blue Heron's recordings also include a CD of plainchant

and polyphony to accompany Thomas Forrest Kelly's book Capturing Music: The Story of

Notation and the live recording Christmas in Medieval England. Jessie Ann Owens (UC Davis) 

and Blue Heron won the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological

Society to support an eventual world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore's first book of 

madrigals (1542).

Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

and has appeared at the Boston Early Music Festival; in New York City at Music Before 1800,

The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the 92nd Street Y; at the Library of Congress

and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC; at the Berkeley Early Music Festival; and in San

Luis Obispo, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. 

Blue Heron has been in residence at the Center for Early Music Studies at Boston University

and at Boston College. In 2015, the ensemble embarked on a long-term project to perform

the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497). Entitled Ockeghem@6oo, it will

wind up in 2020-2021, in time to commemorate the composer's approximate 600th birthday.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

Writing in the mid-i430s, just before the dedication of Florence's cathedral, Santa Maria del

Fiore, and its splendid, newly completed dome, Leon Battista Alberti singled out five men

whose works, he said, "are as worthy of esteem as any of the glories of antiquity”: Filippo 

Brunelleschi, Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, and Masaccio. Architects,

sculptors, painters —these men represent the very best of Florentine arts under the Medici,

and it is no surprise that all five are Italian. Everyone knows that Italy and Italian genius

gave birth to humanism and what we now call the Renaissance. Had Alberti widened his

gaze a bit to include music, however, his roster of aesthetic heroes would perforce have

taken on a different national cast, for in fifteenth-century Italy the most highly regarded

musicians were not Italians at all, but singers and composers trained in the choir schools of

northern France and the southern Low Countries. Indeed, of the ten members of the papal

chapel that sang at the dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore on March 25,1436 —the Feast

of the Annunciation and the first day of the New Year in Florence as elsewhere in Christian

Europe —eight were French, and first and foremost among them was Guillaume Du Fay.

Du Fay arrived in Italy in the 1420s and was a member of Pope Eugenius IV's chapel

during the papal curia's Florentine sojourn, from June 1434 to April 1436. (Alberti, too, was a

member of the curia.) In Florence, Du Fay joined a dazzling community of artists and humanists 

flourishing under Medici rule and patronage. Luca della Robbia (the central subject of the

exhibition that surrounds us today) created many of his most famous works for the cathedral, 

including the marble Cantoria or Singer's Gallery (1431-1438), a series of marble reliefs for

the bell tower (1437), two reliefs in colored, glazed terra-cotta depicting the Resurrection (1442 -

1445), the Ascension (1446-1451), and, in collaboration with Michelozzo, bronze doors for

the sacristy (completed in 1469). Du Fay for his part composed a compact but spectacular

motet, "Nuper rosarum flores," for the ceremonies surrounding the dedication of the cathedral.

Rigorously constructed on a scaffolding of two cantus firmi, "Nuper rosarum flores”

presents a dense network of numerological allusions. The text, which consists of four stanzas

of seven lines of seven syllables (perhaps by Du Fay himself), is set to music in four sections, 

each of which consists of twenty-eight (i.e., 4x7) breves (or measures) for two upper voices,

followed by twenty-eight breves for all four parts, in which the two tenors sing their interlocking cantus firmi, each quoting (at different pitch levels) the first four words and fourteen

notes of the plainchant Introit of the Mass for the Dedication of a Church ("Terribilis est

locus iste"). The speed at which the tenors sing the four iterations of their lines is controlled

by mensurations (more or less equivalent to time signatures) in the proportions 6:4:23. Four

and seven are numbers rich with significance in Christian tradition — seven has a particularly

Marian resonance, recalling Mary's seven sorrows, seven joys, seven acts of mercy, seven

feasts, and so on —and, as has been shown by Craig Wright, the proportions 6:4:23 correspond precisely to those of the Temple of Solomon as it is described in the first Book of Kings.

Furthermore, the building was begun in the fourth year of Solomon's reign, completed in seven

years, and dedicated in the seventh month of the year in a service which lasted "seven days

and seven days, even fourteen days" (1 Kings 8:65). The proportions of the temple were held

to have spiritual significance—"Six therefore represents the perfection of the work, two the

dilection and proximity of God, three the hope of divine vision," according to the Venerable

75th Season • 5
Bede —and they are in turn reflected in the proportions of Florence's cathedral, dedicated to

the Virgin Mary. Mary was herself seen as a temple in which the Son of God was conceived 

and borne, and was consecrated by Gabriel's word just as the Venetian Gabriele Condulmer, 

Pope Eugenius, consecrates Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore. Out of all this symbolism,

numerology, and mathematics, Du Fay creates a work of playful melody, rich harmony, and

imposing sonority.

Du Fay probably also composed the new plainchant sequence for the dedication, ''Nuper

almos rose flores," whose text shares words and imagery with the motet "Nuper rosarum

flores," and before leaving Florence he would write, "Mirandas parit hec urbs Florentina

puellas," which extols the beauty of Florentine women in classical hexameters brimming

with classical allusions, and a motet, "Salve flos Tusce gentis," setting elegiac couplets in

praise of Florence —two works hopeful to please an audience of humanists. (The texts of 

both pieces are probably also by Du Fay.) Du Fay remained in contact with the Medici for the

rest of his life, sending four laments on the fall of Constantinople to Piero and Giovanni de'

Medici in 1456 (his letter to them, in French, survives), and in the 1460s arranging for singers

he had trained in France to join the choir of the Baptistery, which had been established by

Cosimo de' Medici in 1438 and was administered by his son Piero. In 1467, Piero de' Medici

described Du Fay as "the greatest ornament of our age"— an astonishing compliment, even

allowing for hyperbolic flattery, from a patron of such discernment in the city at the very 

center of the Renaissance.

If Du Fay was the most technically skilled and innovative composer in Europe in this

great age of innovation and technical advancement, the composer most renowned for crafting

elegant and enchanting secular songs was his contemporary Gilles de Bins, known as Binchois

("the man from Bins”). Binchois spent most of his career in the service of the duke of Burgundy

and never ventured south of the Alps, but his music spread far and wide in manuscript

copies, including a small songbook owned by none other than Piero de' Medici, in which

Binchois is represented by twelve of nineteen works. Binchois's graceful style established a

standard that musicians not trained in the northern schools were hard put to achieve. A

correspondence in 1445 among members of the Medici circle records the rather desperate

efforts of an Italian, Antonio Squarcialupi, to devise an adequate setting for a ballata by Piero's

brother Giovanni. After weeks of struggle, Antonio, a celebrated musician who was the cathedral's organist from 1432 until his death in 1480, manages to cobble together a song for Piero's

wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni to learn, but he declares himself dissatisfied with the results and

expresses his hope that with the help of a local French singer, Benoit, a replacement may be

fashioned that might "be given a character approaching something not differing from Binchois.”

Decades after they were composed, Binchois's songs remained in favor among the 

Medici. On a Florentine visit in 1460, Pope Pius II and his entourage were entertained by

performances, both vocal and instrumental, of "Dueil angoisseux" and "Mon cuer chante" by

Piero's daughters Bianca (then aged fourteen) and Nannina (eleven), and a third, unnamed 

girl. Both these songs are found in Piero's songbook, as are all the other songs on our program 

today, a small sample of Binchois's suave and memorable melodies, propulsive and varied 

rhythms, and perfectly judged balance between harmonic consonance and dissonance.

Program notes by Scott Metcalfe

6 * National Gallery of Art

Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Atlantic Reed Consort

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

American Roots: Branches from Beginning

February 15,12:10

West Building Lecture Hall

A Far Cry with Roomful of Teeth

Music in Common Time

Music by Ted Hearne, Prokofiev,

and Caroline Shaw

February 19, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Works by Jeffrey Mumford

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

“in soft echoes... a world awaits

music for strings and piano

February 22,12:10

West Building, West Garden Court

New York Opera Society 

American Inspiration, Norwegian Innovation

Program in collaboration with the

Norwegian Embassy

February 26, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Carmen Balthrop, soprano,

Jose Caceres, piano 

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

Music by David DiChiera, Leslie Adams, 

Charles Davidson, and others

March 1,12:10

West Building, West Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2ory Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington

Cover Luca della Robbia, Madonna and Child

(detail), c. 1475, National Gallery of Art,

Washington, Widener Collection

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street NW,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gallery Archives