Marvelous Motets

The term “motet” for a vocal composition was derived from the French “mot”, for “word”. In early 13th century Paris, liturgical music was based on plainchant, with some voices harmonizing on long vowel syllables; the composers Leonin and Perotin at Notre Dame Cathedral added words to these upper voices and the result came to be known as “motets”; eventually the term came to mean a choral work often with four or more voice parts and often with instruments; the sung texts were ones not part of core elements of the Roman liturgy (mainly the Mass). Motet texts were frequently from Psalms, hymns, and prayers, and eventually included some original texts by their composers, though these were usually closely linked to Biblical sources.

Josquin des Préz was born c. 1450 in the province of Hainaut, the present-day border of France and Belgium. This region was dominated by French culture. Josquin was revered in his own and following generations for his large output of Masses, motets, and secular “chansons”, of which we have more than fifty.

Trends during the fifteenth century included a deepening of sonorities; there was more writing for low voices, whereas church music, especially, seems to have previously made use of falsetto. Thus Christobal Morales created his Mass on “Mille Regretz” for six parts ranging from treble, sung by boys, through several alto, tenor, and bass parts all in the range of adult male voices. Only male singers performed in church choirs. (All-female convent choirs were an exception.) Adaptation of these low-voice works for today's mixed-voice choirs is done with varying success.

An interesting, though perhaps far-fetched idea was put forth by Paul Henry Lang, in his “Music in Western Civilization”, who suggested that the growing use of more and deeper voice parts in Renaissance music perhaps corresponded to the new-found use of perspective in visual art.

Morales' Mass uses the tune of Josquin's chanson as a basis for flowing musical lines, each imitating another in turn, a style honed by Josquin himself in his own Masses and other works, and increasingly known as the “Netherlands” style. The practice of using a non-religious melody as the musical theme for sacred works like Masses and motets became very popular in the sixteenth century. Earlier composers had used Gregorian chant as a foundation for polyphonic music. As polyphonic works grew more elaborate it still seemed necessary to have a pre-existing melody unite the composition; now, however, it was not so much a spiritual focus but merely provided a musical frame, a kind of scaffolding. Using a secular tune in this way was not considered inappropriate, probably because boundaries in daily life between secular and sacred were not at all rigid. If anything, the tune was ennobled by its use in a Mass or motet, whose composer may have been honoring his predecessor's melody, as in the case of Morales and Josquin.

Morales was born in Seville, Spain, around 1500. He served as choirmaster at the Cathedral of Avila, then as a singer in the Papal Chapel at Rome. He eventually returned to Spain and worked at the cathedral in Toledo and in two other cities. His work has lyrical, expressive qualities. It has been noted that in a later section of the Missa Mille Regretz – the Crucifixus section of the Credo – the part of the “Mille Regretz” melody which speaks of “much pain” is used, and that it may not be mere coincidence.

Thomas Luis da Victoria, born in Avila in 1548, was the greatest Spanish composer of the High Renaissance. He, like Morales, went to Rome, where he served as organist-choirmaster at several churches, but ultimately returned to Spain. While in Rome he was ordained as a priest. Later he entered the service of the Empress Maria and her daughter in Spain; they entered a convent in Madrid in 1584 and Victoria went with them to serve as musician and priest until his death.

Throughout the 16th century there was continuous cross-pollination between other European countries and Italy, center of the great Papal establishment with its fabled choirs.

In motets by the great Elizabethan English composer William Byrd and the Italian Carlo Gesualdo the full extent of emotive possibilities are realized. Byrd's text is not liturgical or even a direct quote from the Bible. “Domine tu jurasti” was published in 1589. Byrd, caught in the middle between his Catholic origin and the Anglican reforms taking place, more than once alluded in his chosen texts to themes of exile and persecution.

Gesualdo was born and died at Naples. He married Eleanora d'Este and settled at Ferrara, a great cultural center. His work is notable for its extreme chromatic harmony. [His life had its own lurid element – he murdered his wife, her lover, and an infant whose paternity he questioned.] Ecce Vidimus Eum was published in 1611.

Ludovico Viadana was maestro from 1594-1609 at the Cathedral of Saint Peter in Mantua. His “Cento Concerti Eccesiastici” was published in 1602 at Venice, where the architecture of Saint Mark's Cathedral inspired placement of multiple choirs and instrumental ensembles so as to perform alternately and together, producing a grand effect. Motets in this style had come to be known as “Concerti”.

Viadana is notable in music history for writing down independent parts for a keyboard instrument to play with the voices, instead of simply doubling the lowest voice or improvising an accompaniment over a bass line. In some of his work the keyboard part is definitely necessary; in others, like “Exultate Justi” the choral composition seems complete without keyboard.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was trained as organist and composer in Italy, but worked chiefly as an organist and far-famed teacher of organists (he was known as “maker of organists”) in Amsterdam. His settings of the Huguenot Psalter (His four-part “Or Sus” was published in 1614.) to some degree accord with the restraints John Calvin imposed on music for his followers in Protestantism. But being at a safe remove in time, Sweelinck and others who wrote choral Psalm settings for the Reformed church were able to bring their artistic inventiveness to the task. The chordal harmony is simple, but the Psalm tune, which we have come to associate with the 100th Psalm, is taken up by each voice part in turn, while the others decorate it. It is constructed much like an organ chorale prelude, and can be played as one.

Hans Leo Hassler was born in Nuremburg, Germany. He too traveled to Italy as a young man to study. He was sponsored by the wealthy Fugger family of Augsburg, who employed him as a chamber musician. He was drawn to folk music and simple dance-like secular songs, and wrote similar compositions, some in Italian and some in German, which we might today call “madrigals”, after their English counterparts.

The German Heinrich Schütz studied as a very young man with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice, and adopted the grand polychoral Venetian style in his Psalmen Davids (1619). Also in those early years in Italy he published madrigals, though not the “fa la” type. They were settings of Italian poetry about love and loss, and it was the custom to “paint” word pictures with musical motifs to illustrate the sense of the poetry. Both Schütz's madrigals and his sacred music use this technique; it enlivens his Psalm settings with drama, as the seas roll, trumpets play, and so forth.

In Pachelbel's Nun Danket Alle Gott, the unifying tune is a German chorale melody. The Lutheran Reformation of the early sixteenth century had produced many new melodies as well as resurrecting old ones that could be sung with German words, though parts of the Protestant services remained in Latin. Unlike the early followers of Calvin, the Lutherans reveled in producing music for worship, urged on by their leader. Martin Luther, himself a composer, assembled eminent musicians to find or write tunes for singing, and these became the inspiration for increasingly elaborate organ and choral works.

The great masters Bach and Brahms need no introduction. Bach wrote 7 motets, Brahms 13. Brahms' “O Heiland, Reiss die Himmel Auf” is written in a somewhat archaic contrapuntal style, more so than his other motets. He seems at times to be paying homage to Bach.

We close with music for early 19th-century America.

Louise Lee