Josquin des Prez – Praeter rerum seriem (early 16th century)

I never know what to write about pieces like this.  There’s no weird chromaticism or shocking texture changes — just beautifully written six-part vocal polyphony.  More than 400 years after Pérotin, there’s still a bit of chant turned into a cantus firmus, sung in ultra slow motion while the other voices play around it — but now the cantus firmus appears not only in the tenor but also in the superius, and the play of the other voices is largely built out of little canons.  (Hey, that sounds like a piece of architecture, doesn’t it?)  At times the combination of long held notes, harmonic stasis and frequent points of imitation create a texture that sounds awfully like someone singing through delay and reverb effects.  In fact, I recently heard a piece for sax quartet that intentionally imitated the sound of a delay pedal — Aristides Llaneza’s The second time I have looked out the window (2010) — and the effect wasn’t that different from what Josquin achieves.

The motet’s text is about the mystery of the virgin birth, and the music’s melanch0ly air seems to reflect Josquin’s sadness at being unable to fully understand the workings of the universe:  ”Who can fathom the profundity of your labor’s beginning and its end?”  At the end, there’s something of an answer, but it’s one of those mystical answers that doesn’t really answer anything:  when the text refers to God having “ordered everything with such perfection,” the music switches to triple mensuration, a symbol of divine order since the Middle Ages.  It’s surprising how much continuity there is with Medieval music, here in this piece by the first composer ever to take the brash, arrogant, artist-comes-first attitude usually associated with Romanticism.

Thomas Tallis – Lamentations of Jeremiah (15??)

Well, this certainly has more character than the last Elizabethan sacred choral piece I listened to!  It’s partially because the different textures are more clearly set apart from each other:  one the one hand, you have passages like the overlapping call-and-response on the word “Jerusalem,” sung on a droning E by the alto and echoed on thick chords by the rest of the singers, and on the other hand, you have all these little points of imitation, often at the third, fourth or fifth — and at the very beginning of the piece, outlining a series of stacked fifths.  (I am correct in thinking that’s really unusual for the period, right?)  It’s also partially because of the peculiar bottom-heaviness of the counterpoint, with intervals as small as a third appearing as low as the A and C above low C.  (Actually, though, I’m not sure that’s a good thing:  the piece gets a bit muddy at times.)  And it’s partially because Tallis is much more willing to branch out harmonically than Byrd, often in ways that create third-relations which wouldn’t seem out of place in, say, a song by Hugo Wolf (see, for example, the passage that starts “Plorans ploravit,” with its alternation between C major and Eb major triads).  But more than anything else, it’s because Tallis really likes dissonance.  And I don’t just mean suspensions and apoggiaturas:  I mean simultaneously sounded cross-relations, particularly between the raised and non-raised leading tone, often not even resolved by step.  He doesn’t do it all that often in the piece, but in a way that almost makes it more shocking:  you’re listening to all these pleasant consonant harmonies and then suddenly:  huh?  was that a wrong note?

You know what, though?  I still prefer the Zumaya Lamentations.  No matter how forward-looking Tallis was, and no matter how backward-looking Zumaya was, melancholy will always win out over contemplative as far as I’m concerned.