Sacred Music - From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century [CD 2]

Universi qui te expectant
01 Universi qui te expectant (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [02:21]
Dominique Vellard, ténor
Missa da Requiem
02 Introit: Requiem Aeternam (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [01:58]
03 Kyrie eleison (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [01:33]
04 Graduel: Requiem aeternam (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [03:06]
05 Trait: Absolve, Domine (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [02:26]
06 Sequence: Dies irae (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [06:30]
07 Offertoire: Domine Jesu Christe (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [03:58]
08 Sanctus (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [00:45]
09 Agnus Dei (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [00:54]
10 Communion: Lux aeterna (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [01:01]
11 Repons: Libera me (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [04:27]
12 Antienne: In paradisum (The Vast Corpus of Gregorian Chant) [01:10]
Deller Consort, dir. Alfred Deller
MASS FROM THE YEAR 1000
Anonymous 4
13 Agnus dei: Omnipotens eterne (Mass from the Year 1000 - excerpts) [03:03]
14 Communion tropee: Corpus quod nunc / Psallite Domino (Mass from the Year 1000 - excerpts) [02:31]
15 Hymne: Cives clestis patrie (Mass from the Year 1000 - excerpts) [05:39]
Anonymous 4
CODEX CALIXTINUS (c. 1150)
16 Invitatoire: Regem regum dominum (Codex Calixtinus. Plainchant for Santiago da Compostela) [00:52]
17 Repons: Iacobe servorum (Codex Calixtinus. Plainchant for Santiago da Compostela) [02:14]
18 Offertoire: Ascendens Ihesus in montem (Codex Calixtinus. Plainchant for Santiago da Compostela) [03:48]
Anonymous 4
CISTERCIAN CHANT
19 In timore De (Cistercian Chant. 12th century) [05:59]
20 Testamentum eternum (Cistercian Chant. 12th century) [05:33]
21 Dedit Dominus confessionem sancto suo (Cistercian Chant. 12th century) [05:25]
MAGNUS LIBER ORGANI
22 Anonyme: Natus est rex (Magnus Liber Organi. 12 th century) [05:27]
23 Adam de St. Victor: In natale (Magnus Liber Organi. 12 th century) [06:03]
Ensemble Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès

CD 2

‘Gregorian chant’: the term itself is a curious one, for St Gregory the Great (c.532-604) in fact had nothing to do with the
genesis of this chant (which dates from the late eighth century). His contribution was limited to organising the liturgy. So let us
forget ‘his’ Antiphoner, ‘his’ song-schools or his notation of neumes under dictation from the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.
These legends were the work of the Carolingians, who wished to use chant as a means of unifying their empire. At the time
there were numerous exchanges of cantors between Rome and Gaul to organise this reform, which soon spread throughout
Western Christendom, with the exception of Rome which remained faithful to Old Roman chant until the thirteenth century.

The Council of Trent, which gave Palestrina the task of ridding Gregorian chant of its ‘superfluities’, then the French Revolution
spelt the end of performing traditions in this repertory. From the late nineteenth century, the monks of Solesmes Abbey set
out to rediscover them and to establish a reliable edition (the Vatican Edition, followed by the Graduale Triplex). A notable
dilemma is how to interpret the rhythm of this ‘plainchant’ (literally ‘level chant’). A variety of points of view coexist, from the
sober vision of Solesmes to the more decorated versions favoured by Peres or Vellard in an attempt to uncover the oriental
roots of this chant.

THE REIGN OF GREGORIAN CHANT

The common stock of the liturgy having been dispersed into numerous more or less autonomous branches (CD 1), it was not
long before the Papacy considered it necessary to restore it to a unified whole. Several conditions favoured this endeavour: the
monasteries, founded on the initiative of St Benedict from the sixth century, became veritable music schools, highly suitable
institutions for the teaching of the ‘official’ liturgical chant. The Frankish kingdom and then the Carolingian Empire gave it the
decisive political impulse that the Roman intentions lacked. In this ‘restoration’ of the repertory the Gallican dialect seems to
have played a very important component part.

Whatever the case may be, this restoration, continued and intensified after the accession of Charlemagne (768), who took it
upon himself to impose it throughout his realms, consisting in the compiling of a fixed Roman liturgy based on the principal
existing repertories (essentially Roman and Gallican), was started at Metz, the birthplace of the reformer appointed by Pope
Stephen II. This was how the canon of the Gregorian Antiphoner assumed its definitive form: whilst the organisation of the
Office of the Hours (the ordering of daily monastic prayer) already fixed by Saint Benedict preserved a certain degree of
flexibility, the form of the Mass was rigorously established, even though all of its components would not be finally assembled
until the eleventh century, with the addition of the Credo. The Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei
(with the Ite missa est) constituted the Ordinary of all Masses, while the pieces in the Proper varied according to the feast day.

The Mass of the Dead – or Requiem – was the only form of the Mass to contain both the Ordinary and the Proper, consisting
of the chants presented almost in full on this recording. In its diversity the Gregorian Requiem thus exploits a wide emotional
palette, ranging through all of the church modes (or tones): Plagal F (VI) in the Introit and the Kyrie, Plagal D (II) in the
highly vocalised Gradual, Authentic D (I) for the famous Dies Irae, Offertory and Libera me, Plagal G (VIII) for the Tract, etc.

A MASS FROM THE YEAR 1000


Europe was plunged into a nightmarish cycle of deadly feuds, invasion and war. Although the Church began to transform its
spiritual authority into political power under the brilliant leadership of Pope Sylvester II, the fear and anticipation of the Last
Judgment and end of the world influenced the late tenth-century Christian world view. While many simple folk were unaware
of the exact year and its significance, laymen and clerics alike (themselves unaware that the ‘official’ calendar was a few years
off in dating Jesus’ birth) debated the exact hour and day of ‘the end’. Would it be on New Year’s Eve 999 or New Year’s Day
1000, or Easter, or Ascension Day, or Christmas; or would the end actually come in 1033 – a thousand years after the death
and resurrection of Jesus? In the Apocalypse, John the Divine had seen the devil being chained and sealed for a thousand
years, then let loose for ‘a little season’. Was the terror and uncertainty of the tenth century a sign of Satan’s return? Would an
antichrist rise up, to be defeated in anticipation of the Last Judgment? Who would be saved, who damned, and what horrors
awaited the earth?

What are the musical manuscripts that show traces of this fear of the year 1000? There is, notably, a number of manuscripts
of c.1000 originating in Aquitaine, in south-western France (many of them associated with the Abbey of St Martial in Limoges).
The troped portions of the Aquitanian chants would almost certainly have been adorned with polyphony, created by the singers
according to certain rules of improvisation that are preserved for us in theoretical treatises of the time. The prose, or prose
with sequence, its origins related to the practice of troping, was a relatively new addition to the medieval Mass, with Frankish
composers of the ninth and tenth centuries adding great numbers of them for specific saints and feasts, large and small, to
the liturgical stock.

The hymn Cives celestis patrie, for example, describes and explains the mystical meaning of the jewels that constitute the
foundations of the new Jerusalem – the perfect city that will replace the earth at the end of time.

CODEX CALIXTINUS (LIBER SANCTI JACOBI)

Since the late twelfth century, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela has possessed a manuscript entitled Jacobus (and also
called Liber Sancti Jacobi or Codex Calixtinus). Its five books contain sermons on St James, chants and lessons for his feasts,
accounts of his miracles and legends, an epic tale of Charlemagne in Spain, an informative travel guide to the pilgrimage
routes through France and Spain, and a contemporary ‘supplement’ of polyphonic music. How it found its way to Compostela
is not known for certain, but it is undoubtedly a French product, probably compiled or written in Cluny around 1150.

About ninety percent is plainchant for the Vigil and Feast of St James (25 July) and for the Translation of his body from
Palestine to Galicia (30 December). Most of it is specifically liturgical: hymns, antiphons, responsories, and versicles for the
Divine Office and Mass propers and ordinaries. Many, if not most, of these were contrafacta (i.e. adapted from existing chants);
and most of them are attributed in the manuscript to specific (usually French) authors – clerics and other notables, some
famous and others unknown. Until recently it was thought that these attributions were fanciful, but research has verified
many of them. For plainchant works based on existing melodies, these authors probably wrote new texts, often drawn from St
James’s copious miracle literature rather than from scripture. – S. H.

CISTERCIAN CHANT

Hardly had the Gregorian repertory been compiled than tropes, sequences and other ‘impure’ glosses began to proliferate


Citeaux, the founders of the Cistercian Order. They therefore set out in quest of the original forms of monastic life, at the risk
of calling into question usages that had been established for centuries.

Their approach was one of simplification, a return to original purity, wholly comparable with the architectural precepts
practised at Citeaux or Fontenay.

For Stephen Harding, the third abbot of Citeaux, this revival of the original purity of church chanting implied the return to
Roman usage. Since both Rome and Italy were in the throes of violent political upheaval it was decided to dispatch missions
of precentors to Metz, which was supposed to have been the capital of the Gregorian reform. Despite their subsequent
disillusionment with the Metz tradition, which they deemed corrupt and faulty, Stephen Harding was so set on a return to the
‘Roman’ tradition that he ordered them none the less to make copies of the books.

After his death in 1134 his successors, more attached to their ideals of purity than to a respect for false traditions, busied
themselves even more zealously with ‘purifying’ the chant of ‘foreign strains’ according to ‘the logic of arcane theories’, as
Marcel Peres writes: ‘The mode in which each piece is set should be clearly discernible, without ambiguity or a mixture of
modes. Within the mode each degree of the scale should maintain its position in the scalar hierarchy . . . ; similarly the
compass of each mode should not exceed the limits that were allocated to it.’ Devoted essentially to the melodic material
(even if this necessitated composing a new repertory), this reform took place at the period of the building of the Cistercian
churches of Fontenay, Senanque, Le Thoronet, whose characteristic acoustics were distinguished by exceedingly long periods
of reverberation that amplified the harmonics and permitted the full value of the principal notes of each mode to be heard
with great clarity, as is borne out on listening to the respond for Matins of the Feast of St Bernard (20 August), a fully-fledged
member of the repertory entirely created by the successors of Stephen Harding. ‘Sung in the middle of the night, after each of
the twelve lessons of the monastic Office of Matins, they punctuate the chanting of the psalms and are like an ultimate homage
that perfectly incarnates the musical spirit of Citeaux’ (Marcel Peres).

MAGNUS LIBER ORGANI

With the Magnus Liber Organi, we enter one of the monuments of the religious and musical culture of the Middle Ages: Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris. We might expect to encounter the first stirrings of the first great medieval revolution, the birth of
polyphony. But the two pieces presented here remain obstinately monophonic!

The first thing that strikes us here marks a crucial change: with the piece In Natale, for the first time, we come across a
composer’s name. All of the music from St Martial was anonymous, reflecting the self-effacing, collective spirit that was typical
– and expected – of medieval monastic life. Not so the music from Notre Dame. Not only are many of the composers known;
they were among the most distinguished members of the cathedral community. Adam of St Victor was cantor at Notre Dame
from early in the century until his death in around 1140. In that role, he was one of the highest ranking dignitaries in the
cathedral hierarchy. His duties included supervision of the music sung in the liturgy, and it was probably in this capacity that
he created a body of song that became famous throughout Europe. And Adam of St Victor was the first name in a distinguished
line . . . – P. Hi.