Briefly Noted: Josquin and Phrygian Pain

Josquin Desprez, Missa Malheur me bat, Gli Angeli Genève, Stephan MacLeod (released on September 22, 2023) Aparté AP338 | 67'

One cannot have too many recordings of Josquin's cyclic Masses, at least not yet. The complete set by the Tallis Scholars remains hard to beat, but then along comes Gli Angeli Genève with this new release of a program centered on the elusive Renaissance composer's Missa Malheur me bat. The group, founded in 2005, is mostly known for Baroque repertoire, especially Bach. This turn to the High Renaissance was a bit of a surprise, at least to me. The group's director, bass Stephan MacLeod, anchors a group of nine singers. They sing mostly two on each of the four parts in most pieces, with baritone Frederik Sjollema swinging back and forth between tenor and bass.

The sound, recorded at the Eglise Saint-Germain in Geneva, is less aggressive than the Tallis Scholars, who recorded this Mass only about a decade ago: slightly smaller in number of voices, but also more intimate, more rarefied and refined. MacLeod uses one-on-a-part textures in interesting ways, as in building up to the climax with all nine singers in the long Miserere mei deus. This Mass is one of several based on the three-part chanson "Malheur me bat" (formerly attributed to Ockeghem, but now thought to be the work of a composer named Malcort), transcribed along with the Mass in the old Smijers edition of Josquin's music. (The chanson has not survived in any manuscript source with its complete text.)

In a booklet interview, MacLeod said that the appeal of this particular Mass setting was its mode, the Phyrgian (mode 3). Since the chronology of Josquin's music is almost impossible to establish with any certainty, the modality serves instead as programmatic theme, as all the motets placed between the movements of the Mass are in the same mode. With its distinctive half-step above the final, the Phrygian often served as a musical marker for lamentation, which it does in these motets and in the chanson on which the Mass is based, describing both sacred and secular grief: Douleur me bat, Nymphes des bois (for death of Ockeghem), Miserere mei deus, and Mille regretz (of which the attribution to Josquin is now challenged by scholars).

The only non-Phrygian piece is the final motet, Praeter rerum seriem, which follows the last movement of the Mass. (MacLeod's assertion that the text of this motet expresses doubt about the perpetual virginity of Mary is a misreading: no matter what it may mean for MacLeod's beliefs, the text is about wonder and mystery, not doubt.) Praeter rerum seriem is a hymn set in six parts: Josquin has the superius and the tenor answer one another on the original Gregorian melody. To point this out, the choir introduces the motet by singing a verse of the hymn melody by itself in this way, antiphonally back and forth, phrase by phrase, with the triple meter of the polyphony sped up.

The Mass is a compositional wonder, in four voices, but with some two-voice sections in the Sanctus, where the "Hosanna" is over 50 measures long, with interesting shifts of triple and duple and extremely dense textures. The amazing second statement of the Agnus dei, for alto and tenor, is an extended canon at the 2nd, of remarkable complexity. Josquin then outdoes himself in the third Agnus, expanding to six parts: both altus and bassus are split into two, doubled in close canon at the unison. MacLeod and his ensemble sing the piece at the pitch where it was notated (E), just as the Tallis Scholars did, and with women's voices on the superius part.


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CD Reviews: Josquin's Dice Mass

Patrick Rucker and Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Fresh takes on Gershwin and Josquin
Washington Post, January 19

Josquin Desprez, Missa Di dadi / Missa Une mousse de Biscaye, Tallis Scholars, P. Phillips (released on October 28, 2016) Gimell CDGIM048 | 71'13"

By all accounts, Josquin des Prez (c. 1450-1521) was the Beethoven of the high Renaissance. In one of his sermons, Martin Luther declared the composer “the master of the notes, which must do as he wills; the other choirmasters must do as the notes will.” The Tallis Scholars, the redoubtable English choir that specializes in Renaissance music, is recording all of the polyphonic settings of the Latin Mass Ordinary attributed to Josquin. The group released the sixth volume of the set a few weeks ago on Gimell Records, its private label, and it continues to be authoritative.

Yet neither of the two Masses on the new recording might actually be by Josquin. Elements of the composer’s style seem to abound in the “Missa Di dadi” (“Mass of the dice”), including long strands of bicinia, two-part sections of music, for various combinations of the four voices, piled up in strict imitation of one another. Voices repeat motifs obsessively in some places, and there are long chains of reiterated suspensions in almost endless cycles — in, for example, the “Crucifixus” section of the Credo.

The composer drew the tenor part of the Mass from “N’aray je jamais mieulx” (“Will I never have better”), a rondeau by Robert Morton. A pair of the titular dice appear in the score at the beginning of each movement, indicating the ratio by which the tenors must alter the rhythms of their part in some of the movements for a performance to make sense. (The Tallis Scholars have published the edition by Timothy Symons that was used for the recording, although the performance deviates from it in some minor matters.)

The second piece, “Missa Une mousse de Biscaye,” also is based on a secular tune: a folk song about a conversation between a French man and a Basque girl (“mousse” derives from the Spanish word “moza,” meaning girl). A curious piece, it might be an early Mass by Josquin, composed before he had reached his mature style, or it might not be by Josquin at all. Both pieces receive detailed, balanced performances on this disc, with intonation and blend, within each section and across the choir, up to the Tallis Scholars’ incomparable standards.

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Briefly Noted: Latest from Stile Antico

The Phoenix Rising, Stile Antico (released on August 13, 2013) HMU 807582 | 74'18" From the Imperial Court: Music for the House of Hapsburg, Stile Antico (released on September 9, 2014) HMU 807595 | 71'07"

British choir Stile Antico, founded in 2001, has become the young vanguard for Renaissance polyphony in my ears, alongside the more established Tallis Scholars. Their recordings and their live performances -- in Washington, in 2011 and 2013 -- have both justified this admiration. Both of their most recent discs show perhaps a minor few cracks in the foundation (some tremulous sounds in the sopranos, some wobbles here and there, some intonation infelicities) but are on the whole rewarding listening.

Last year's The Phoenix Rising was offered in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Carnegie UK Trust, which funded the publication of the Denkmäler, that is, monumental edition, Tudor Church Music. For many composers featured on the disc -- Byrd, Gibbons, Morley, Tallis, Taverner, all so beautifully recorded by Stile Antico over the years -- TCM was the first edition in modern notation available to choral singers, sparking the Renaissance of English Renaissance church music. Byrd's Mass for Five Voices, with its smoldering Agnus Dei, provides the foundation for a selection of motets, including gorgeous renditions of Byrd's evergreen Ave verum corpus and Robert White's extraordinary alternatim Compline hymn Christe qui lux es et dies.

From the Imperial Court, set to be released next month, brings together the music of composers in the employ of Maximilian I and other Hapsburg emperors, including Josquin Desprez, Heinrich Isaac, Pierre de la Rue, Ludwig Senfl, Thomas Crecquillon, and others. The works chosen reveal some intriguing historical moments in the Hapsburg family (these are largely pieces that cannot be sung in a liturgical context), like Isaac's Virgo prudentissima (composed for the Reichstag in 1507, proclaiming Maximilian I as Holy Roman Emperor, with text and music making a nifty parallel between the new words and the cantus firmus at the words "electa ut sol") and Crecquillon's Andreas Christi famulus (probably for a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose patron was St. Andrew). There are delightful discoveries to be made, too, including Gombert's six-voice augmentation of Josquin's Mille regretz (alongside the original) and Clemens non Papa's Carole magnus eras.

More of Tallis Scholars' Josquin Cycle

Complete Josquin Edition: M. Pange Lingua / M. La Sol Fa Re Mi / L'homme armé Masses (2006) M. Sine nomine / M. Ad fugam (2008) [Review] Missa De beata virgine / Missa Ave maris stella (2011) [Review]

Josquin Des Prez, M. Malheur me bat / M. Fortuna desesperata, Tallis Scholars (released on March 10, 2009) Gimell CDGIM 042 | 75'27"

I somehow missed one volume in the Tallis Scholars' excellent complete set of the Masses of Josquin Des Prez. In these works, Josquin exhausts all of the techniques for reusing preexisting material in a setting of the Latin Ordinary. To go with the Masses recorded so far -- organized using paraphrases of one or more Gregorian chants or of a secular tune, soggetto cavato (a technique that Josquin innovated), strict canon, or quotation of earlier chants or polyphonic melodies in cantus firmus -- the 2009 installment presents two Masses in which Josquin helped innovate the so-called "parody" or imitation Mass technique. In both of these settings, Josquin uses a 3-voice secular work of polyphony -- the expressive French chanson Malheur me bat, once attributed to Josquin's teacher Ockeghem but now thought to be the work of an obscure Flemish composer named Malcort, and the Latin-texted Fortuna desperata attributed (but not decisively) to Antoine Busnoys -- as the basis for each movement of the Mass. Far from being merely derivative, the imitation technique is just another way to take pre-composed material and wring out its contrapuntal possibilities, especially in Josquin's hands.

The booklet essay by the ensemble's director, Peter Phillips, lays out most of the striking parts of these Masses. The Missa Malheur me bat, believed by scholars to be the later of the two, is an absolutely gorgeous piece, beauty that is only heightened by an understanding of what Josquin was up to formally. As is often the case, Josquin was writing for three male voices plus probably trebles (or falsettists) on the top part. He uses the parts of the chanson in close polyphony, while sometimes also setting the superius in his top voice in longer note values. There are some glorious bicinia in the Sanctus and especially the Agnus Dei (the second invocation of the text, set for two tenors in close imitation), and in the Hosanna sections some exciting mensural shifts into triple time. In the final Agnus Dei, Josquin adds an extra altus and bass part, which follow their counterparts in strict canon by one beat. It is both contrapuntally ingenious and stunningly beautiful listening. The Missa Fortuna desperata is also set for four voices, but in it Josquin has not quite been able to square contrapuntal complexity -- in the Credo, for example, he quotes the source work in mensuration signs that gradually speed up the piece throughout the long text -- with the same ease of musical beauty, ending up with writing that is more austere.

Briefly Noted: More Josquin

Complete Josquin Edition: M. Pange Lingua / M. La Sol Fa Re Mi / L'homme armé Masses (2006) M. Sine nomine / M. Ad fugam (2008) M. Malheur me bat / M. Fortuna desesperata (2009)

Josquin Des Prez, Missa De beata virgine / Missa Ave maris stella, Tallis Scholars (released on November 8, 2011) Gimell CDGIM 044 | 75'58"

As someone who listens to a lot of music, I hate to answer that irksome question about my favorite composer. If pressed, however, I would probably say that I most admire the work of Josquin Des Prez (c. 1440-1521), who was the equal of Leonardo or Michelangelo in composition. He composed secular and sacred music, but for any composer worth his salt, the cyclic Mass was the symphony, the magnum opus of the day, and Josquin's polyphonic settings of the Latin Mass are the summa of the art. Every possible manner of unifying the movements of the Ordinary is explored -- canon, parody of chanson and motet, cantus firmus, chant paraphrase -- but this music is enjoyable first and foremost just as music because of the beauty of his melodic writing and the variation of textures. The Tallis Scholars have undertaken a complete recorded survey of Josquin's Masses, begun in 2006 with the re-release of a 2-CD set of their older discs devoted to this composer. The new recordings in the series, last mentioned in 2008, continue to be just as valuable as those older ones, which introduced many eager young graduate students like myself to the complexity of this music in the best way possible. Before the golden age of early music recording, graduate students spent part of their seminars singing through this kind of music -- an exercise I also enjoy and that imparts a completely different pleasure and greater knowledge.

The most recent disc, released last year, includes what in the Renaissane was likely the most known and performed of Josquin's Masses, the Missa De beata vergine (known in almost 70 different manuscript copies), which brings together paraphrases of several chants for feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As he often did, Josquin adds a fifth voice in most of the later movements, augmenting the canonic complexity but in other places stripping down the texture to more austere bicinia. In a couple of often commented on places, he creates the sensation of duple versus triple rhythm, and director Peter Phillips has restored some of the Marian tropes added to the Ordinary in Josquin's original setting, struck from the score in later editions after the Council of Trent, which eliminated all tropes from the liturgy. It is paired with an almost unknown setting of the Credo, preserved in only one source from Cambrai, a piece that may not even be by Josquin except that it is firmly identified as such in the manuscript. The disc concludes with the concise Missa Ave maris stella -- director Peter Phillips goes so far as to label it a Missa brevis -- which by its quotation of another Marian hymn rounds out the program quite nicely.

Tallis Scholars Doing What They Do Best

Sacred Music in the Renaissance, Vol. 1, Tallis Scholars (released on October 12, 2010) Gimell GIMBOX 301 | 5h14 Vol. 2 Vol. 3

In a couple years the Tallis Scholars will celebrate the 40th anniversary of their founding (we marked the 30th anniversary in 2003). Few performing groups have contributed so much to the study of and enthusiasm for Renaissance music. My graduate school adviser used to speak about how students of Renaissance music had to study these scores, mostly by singing them themselves. While that is still an excellent way to understand the complexity of Renaissance polyphony, the recordings of the Tallis Scholars revealed the beauty created by these composers in a way that was self-evident, and not just to the musically obsessed. We have reviewed the group more than a few times, in concert (2008 and 2007) and on disc (Josquin, Victoria, and Flemish composers). Your next opportunity to hear the group yourself comes a week from Friday, when the Tallis Scholars join the Folger Consort for a concert called A Renaissance Christmas (December 10 to 12), presented at Georgetown University's Gaston Hall. That program will be devoted to English music of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Gimell Records, the label established to distribute the group's recordings, has now released a three-volume set called Sacred Music of the Renaissance, bringing together the most celebrated recordings by the Tallis Scholars. If you never acquired the group's recordings over the years or are not obsessed with Renaissance music, this is a fairly affordable way to get caught up -- three sets of four CDs each, with each box devoted to recordings from one of the three decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (the group's first recording on the Gimell label was in 1980 -- this set of twelve discs is distilled from a total of 50 CDs released over those years). All of the recordings included in the three boxes are indeed beautiful, most of them representing the best available recording of the work in question (and in some cases the only one), showing why the Tallis Scholars still represent in many ways the gold standard of recorded Renaissance music.

These anthologies are not for completists, however, as you will have Josquin's Missa La sol fa re mi but not his Missa Pange lingua (which were both on the disc that won the group the Gramophone Record of the Year in 1987); Palestrina's Missa Assumpta est Maria but not his Missa Sicut lilium (both also on another award-winning disc in 1991); Cipriano de Rore's Missa Praeter rerum seriem but not the Josquin motet on which it was based; and neither of Josquin's two Masses on L'homme armé (the overlap with the group's complete edition of the Mass settings of Josquin is three Masses, with Missa Malheur me bat and Missa Fortuna desperata, on the set's final disc, just having been recorded in 2009). The packaging is simple but elegant and durable: the economy happily does not extend to the booklet materials, which include a full set of texts and translations (English, French, and German) and newly edited essays introducing all of the pieces. The pieces selected include settings of the Requiem Mass by Victoria and Cardoso, Byrd's outstanding Mass for Five Voices and some of Tallis's powerful settings of the Lamentations (along with those of Ferrabosco the Elder, Brumel, White, and Palestrina), and lots from lesser-known English composers (White, Sheppard, Cornysh, Browne).

Highlights include the five/six-voice Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis by Clemens non Papa (for Christmas, unfortunately without the composer's own motet, which was the basis of the Mass); Antoine Brumel's notorious 12-part setting of the Mass known as the Earthquake Mass because it is based on canons derived from the Easter antiphon Et ecce terrae motus (along with Isaac's Missa de Apostolis, also included here, recently re-released in a two-disc set devoted to Flemish composers); Obrecht's monumental Missa Maria zart, a sprawling and densely complicated polyphonic Mass lasting itself over an hour; all eight of Gombert's settings of the Magnificat canticle (one for each mode, more or less), possibly the "swansongs" composed during his imprisonment for having molested a choirboy, music that supposedly led to a pardon from the Holy Roman Emperor; and Palestrina's six-voice Missa Papae Marcelli, long associated with a legend of having preserved the place of complex polyphony in the Catholic liturgy. The selections are book-ended by two recordings of Allegri's fabled setting of the penitential psalm Miserere: an analogue one made in 1980 and another made just in 2007, with additional embellishments by Deborah Roberts (not the legendary one recorded in the Sistine Chapel in 1994).

Tallis Scholars Continue Complete Josquin Edition

Josquin des Prés, Missa Sine nomine / Missa Ad fugam, Tallis Scholars (released March 11, 2008) Gimell CDGIM 039 Other Josquin Masses: M. Pange Lingua / M. La Sol Fa Re Mi / L'homme armé Masses (half-price 2-CD set)

To all those choir directors out there willing to program Palestrina, Victoria, and Byrd, you need to branch out and try some Josquin. By all accounts, Josquin des Prés (c. 1440-1521) was the Beethoven of his age, the undisputed "master of the notes, which must express what he desires, while other composers have to do what the notes dictate." To get to know the glories of the most contrapuntal era, there are fewer better ambassadors than the Tallis Scholars, who with this recent release have announced their plan to record a complete cycle of the Mass settings of Josquin (two older discs have been rechristened as the first and second parts). And to appreciate Josquin's mastery of the notes, what better repertoire than his two Mass settings based entirely on canonic imitation?

Josquin gives a tribute to his teacher, the contrapuntist par excellence Johannes Ockeghem, when he quotes from his own funeral chanson for Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois in the "Et incarnatus est" section of the later of the two Masses recorded here, Missa Sine nomine. It is presented first, the summa of Josquin's composition using strict canons, with his youthful attempt at the process in Missa Ad fugam. In a nice touch, Peter Phillips has made a recording of a rare surviving Renaissance revision, transcribed from a manuscript in the Jena University library, more concise versions of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei from Missa Ad fugam. The sound, captured in Norfolk's Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, is warm and full. The singing hews to the Tallis Scholars standard, full-throated and impeccably tuned, straight of tone and nicely balanced. My recent complaints about the occasional mixture issues are in evidence here, too, as here one voice or there another growls obtrusively instead of yielding to the ensemble. Those concerns are negligible in what is a most pleasing account of this complex music.

Josquin in Boston

This weekend, one of Boston's choral gems -- the Schola Cantorum -- ends its 20th anniversary season with an all-Josquin program on Saturday in Providence and on Sunday in Boston at the Society of St. John the Evangelist. Led by founder Fred Jodry, this early music ensemble was reviewed by Ionarts earlier in the season and can also be heard tomorrow (Thursday) live on Boston classical station WGBH at 3pm (click "radio" then "listen live").