Music For Lent

Miserere nostri
The text appears at least twice in the liturgy: as verse 3 of psalm 122 and as the anti-penultimate verse of the Te Deum. The phrase Miserere nostri is an alternative form of the more familiar Miserere nobis found in the mass ordinary.

Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri.

Have mercy on us Lord have mercy on us.

Miserere nostri is an astoundingly ingenious canon. Most obvious is the canon between the two top voices (mentioned at the foot of page 1), which sing the same line throughout but half a bar apart. Meanwhile, however, a different and less audible canon is in progress between four of the five lower voices: all start singing the same melody at the same time but at four different speeds, two of them in inversion. By bar 6, the Second Bass has already sung the whole of the part assigned to the slowest singer, the First Bass. Amazingly, this fiendish process not only works but produces convincing harmonies which sound as if they are the very raison d’être of this understandably short piece. To enjoy them to the maximum, the music should be taken fairly slowly, so as not to skate over the passing dissonances.

(from the score of CPDL #6605): Original key: F major. Pitch in 16th century England was likely very high and this key is probably closer to the actual performance pitch. This likely earlier work was probably part of a full setting of the Psalm, but this section is all that remains of this setting. It demonstrates surprising rhythmic complexity. Note values and barring have been adjusted for modern notation. It is particularly important in this antiphon to sing through the barlines, allowing the rhythmic and natural accent of the text to guide phrasing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHE7vyAc4w
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De profundis
De Profundis refers to Psalm 130, traditionally known as the De profundis from its opening words in Latin.


[Canticum graduum] De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine;
Domine, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuæ intendentes
in vocem deprecationis meæ.
Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, Domine, quis sustinebit?
Quia apud te propitiatio est; et propter legem tuam sustinui te, Domine.
Sustinuit anima mea in verbo ejus:
Speravit anima mea in Domino.
A custodia matutina usque ad noctem, speret Israël in Domino.
Quia apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio.
Et ipse redimet Israël ex omnibus iniquitatibus ejus.

Translated:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication:
If you, O Lord, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with you is forgiveness,
that you may be revered.
I trust in the Lord;
my soul trusts in his word.
My soul waits for the Lord,
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.
More than sentinels wait for the dawn,
let Israel wait for the Lord;
For with the Lord is kindness
and with him is plenteous redemption;
And he will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8FvOuM1FbY
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Domine convertere
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c82RpIK0Lg

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Quis dabit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qb1rM8y6M

• Date: 1492
• Composer: Heinrich Isaac
• Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)

Review

On April 8, 1492, Florence was shocked by the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico, head of the Medici family which tacitly governed the city. To honor his funeral, a collaborative tribute was arranged between two famous courtiers of Lorenzo's, the poet Angelo Poliziano and the composer Heinrich Isaac. The result was one of Isaac's most famous motets, Quis dabit capiti meo aquam. Poliziano's occasional text is a lament, poignantly asking where the poet could possibly find enough "water for his head" -- water to feed his tears both day and night, like the dying swan and the widowed turtledove. The laurel tree, a pun on the short form of Lorenzo's name and a reference to a family emblem, lies on the ground, struck by lightning. Though his commission must have been extremely hurried, Isaac furnished this elegy with a simple yet affecting funerary monument in sound. For the same event, Isaac also seems to have arranged a lament written for an unknown Hapsburg funeral, whose text, based on a funeral chorus of Seneca, begins with the same two words: Quis dabit pacem populo tementi.

Isaac's task was eased by an act of piracy from his own music: he based nearly all of the motet's first and third parts on music from his Missa Salva nos. This mass, well-known already in Medicean Florence, centers its musical structure about a plainchant Antiphon from the Canticle of Simeon. From the mass, Isaac lifted three sections (the Osanna II, Cum sancto Spiritu, and Kyrie II) onto which he grafted the first and third parts of Poliziano's text. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has shown that this was a select portion of the mass, consisting only of the three climactic movements which share total musical reliance upon the last phrase of a chant: Et requiescamus in pace. This chant fragment, which closely resembles part of the Requiem Mass itself, also contains a descending fourth in the mournful Phrygian mode, a melodic gesture which for centuries would be a principal symbol of lament.

The plangent descending melody, a veritable leitmotiv throughout all voices of Isaac's motet, takes on even greater significance in the central section. As Poliziano's text presents the image of the stricken laurel tree, Isaac reduces the scoring of his motet from four voices to three, with a punning rubric in the Tenor voice: "Laurus tacet" (The laurel [i.e., Lorenzo] is silent). The Bass proceeds to sing the chant five times, the six measures of each statement one pitch lower than the previous iteration; this transposing ostinato suggests a connection to Isaac's own numerologically symbolic Palle, palle. As always, however, the power of Isaac's music is not limited to the symbolic realm. Precomposed or not, every ounce of rhetorical effect is squeezed from his tones, be it the declamatory textures, the mournful overall harmonic scheme, the archaic sounds of Fauxbourdon, the near-canonic musical echo suggesting the weeping all night/weeping all day, or the remarkable harmonic shifts suggesting the song of the turtledove and the swan. ~ Timothy Dickey, Rovi
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Exsurge quare obdormis

• Gregorian Chant
• Period: Medieval (1-1449)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAIWIMVAwjY