Johann Walter’s Cantiones, 1544: historical background and symbolic influences
Creators: name: MacDonald, Alan
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: Johann Walter's two songs for seven voices, from Volume V of his collected works, present what seems to be a confused assemblage: three texts sounded simultaneously in a hierarchical structure of musical parts, at the centre of which is the technical feat of an ex unica canon for four voices. Viewing these pieces as part of the larger world of sixteenth-century vocal music, it seems that the normative procedures of musical composition and textual exposition have been turned inside-out, with startling results. One of the two, the setting of the Vulgate Psalm 119 (118), was performed publicly at the inaugural service of Hartenfels Chapel on Oct. 5, 1544, in the presence of such dignitaries as the reformer Martin Luther and the Saxon Elector, Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous. Texts in praise of these two, and Luther's associate, Philip Melanchthon, are worked into this composition, which was printed by the Lutheran printer Georg Rhau in 1544. The purpose of this thesis is to explain these two works in the context of Walter's own creative vision. The seven-part songs seem to be a bizarre experiment; seen from the viewpoint of the composer's life, which was dedicated to religious expression in music and poetry, they are a natural outgrowth of Christian and Classical traditions in verse, as well as music. The songs are approached from the perspective of Walter's life, and from his works. The initial chapters are primarily biographical, tracing Walter's background and his participation in the events of his own day. The third chapter discusses the putative influences on these songs, and compares them with the available manuscript and print sources which Walter can have had at hand. The description of this material reveals that symbolic relationships were often the genesis of contrapuntal procedures: musical representation in sources with which Walter was familiar included exemplars of the 'Trinitas in Unitate' construction of three-voice canons. Works such as these in Walter's background indicate a more subtle kind of influence at work on the intent of these songs. In addition to the musical influences that Walter drew upon in writing these works, there is also the influence of the revival of learning, and resurrection of the literature of the ancient world, in the presence of the use of Horatian meters and idioms. The relation of Medieval scriptural exegesis is an influence as well, for in these songs, Walter introduces the interpretive approaches to Biblical poetry and constructs the music as an analogue to them. The mirroring of the Medieval exegetical tool of the quadriga in the four-part canon within the musical whole is an example of Walter's desire to achieve a complete artistic synthesis of words and music, a phenomenon which informs his poems on music and its relation to theology. The final chapters treat this ideal, in reference to the songs themselves. The elements of the music are discussed at the end, and the symbolic aspects of the texts and music are detailed. These two songs raise a question. While the setting of Ps. 121 (120), which was not published, seems to provide a model for a composition that involves a synthesis of Biblical and Classical poetic traditions, in an innovative form involving Rennaisance contrapuntal approaches, the publicly-performed sister composition, based on Ps. 119, lacks this total integration of text and interpretive association of meaning through music.