Manuel de Zumaya – Celebren, publiquen (17??)

Yes, it’s another Zumaya piece!  And it turns out he didn’t just write Renaissance music 150 years after the fact — he also did a mean Handel impression.  And it’s not just a stylistic copy, either, despite the long vocal melismas in 16th-notes.  As in the previous two pieces I wrote about, there’s something strange and subtle going on with the relationship between text and music.  The words are all about celebrating the Virgin Mary, but the music is infused with a bittersweet quality, mainly because of its frequent emphasis on ii and vi.  There are trumpets playing fanfare-like ascending scale gestures in the background of the polychoral texture, but because those minor chords keep coming back, the scales often sound more plaintive than triumphant.  Actually, the effect is startlingly similar to the trumpet part of Tori Amos’s “Father Lucifer,” which I once described on another, now defunct blog as sounding “like a sad echo of ‘Penny Lane.’”

The piece is in a simple ABABA form, and there’s something that happens in the B sections that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard in a Baroque piece before.  It’s an orchestral melody that interrupts the singers, and it starts do-sol-re, with the re above the sol – an arpeggiated stacked fifth chord.  The harmonies that accompany this melody are I – V – ii – vi – V — in other words, an ascending fifths progression.  What the hell?  Those exist?  And of course those two minor chords are worked in there as well.  All Zumaya needed to do to reach Skeeter Davis levels of wistfulness was work a iii chord in somehow.

Short post for a short piece, but since I didn’t make one yesterday, stay tuned for more…