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…

Manuel de Zumaya – Sol-fa de Pedro (1715)

OK, this is just awesome.  It’s a bit more familiar-sounding than the Lamentations — specifically, it reminds me of Monteverdi, with its catchy dance-like 6/8 rhythm, bold chromaticism and modulations, frequent points of imitation, and in-your-face text painting.  And I have to say that, to my ears at least, it could go up against the Monteverdi madrigals and not suffer for it at all.  Zumaya may have been behind the times, but he was clearly a composer with an incredibly fertile imagination.  I mean, according to the liner notes, he wrote this as part of the examination process used to select the chapel master at the Mexico City Cathedral.  This is astoundingly good for something written during a test.

The piece is a bit puzzling when you look at the text, though.  I honestly don’t know enough about Christianity to figure out what it’s talking about, but it’s clearly somber — something about Peter lamenting and the narrator being raised up out of sorrow by him.  And yet Zumaya treats the text as an excuse to make silly musical puns, like setting “duro” (“hard”) to major chords because the German word for major is “dur,” or setting “sol” (“sun”) and “mí” (“me”) to the notes sol and mi.  Musical terms are awkwardly inserted into the text — “the chromatic explanation,” “come and hear from the counterpoint” — apparently as an excuse for elaborate flourishes of musical literalism.  But given how delightful, satisfying, refreshing and continually inventive the result is, I’m not complaining.

Manuel de Zumaya – Lamentations of Jeremiah (1717)

I recently got a CD of Mexican Baroque music, something I know absolutely nothing about, thanks to music historians’ tendency to forget that anything other than Europe existed before the 19th century.  According to the liner notes, the two most important composers in 18th-century Mexico were Ignacio de Jerúsalem, whose music looked forward to the galant style, and Manuel de Zumaya, whose music looked back to the Renaissance.  And does it ever!  I’m having a hard time thinking of a specific composer to compare the Lamentations to:  it’s more comfortable with dissonance than Palestrina, less wild and theatrical than Gesualdo and Monteverdi, and though the mood of it reminds me a bit of Josquin’s Miserere (c. 1504), Zumaya is much less concerned with contrapuntal imitation than any of those early 16th-century Flesmish guys.  My knowledge of early music is pretty spotty, so maybe I’m missing an obvious comparison, but the point is, this doesn’t sound at all like something that’s contemporaneous with the Vivaldi Gloria.

The text is highly structured, alternating between single Latin sentences and names of Hebrew letters — “heth,” “teth” and “yod” three times each.  Despite the repeated words, Zumaya’s setting doesn’t contain any literal repetition, except for the fact that his setting of the first “heth” and the last “yod” both start with the chord progression i – VII – VI.  Instead, he treats each textual unit separately, spinning out entirely new melodic material each time.  For the most part, the Hebrew-letter settings are more focused on harmony, while the main-text settings are more contrapuntal.  As in the music of the late Renaissance, the harmonies are right on the edge of functional tonality:  at one point the music moves from E minor to a German augmented sixth chord in B minor, only for a C natural to lead us immediately back to E minor.  There are a lot of dissonances, not dramatically emphasized ones like in early Baroque opera, but augmented chords that resolve properly but still give the music a bit of a bite.  Most importantly, though, something about the piece is achingly, hauntingly sad, in a way that reminds me more of Arvo Pärt than of the usually more beatific music of the 16th century.  It’s not the text, either — the portion of the Lamentations that Zumaya chose to set is more abstract and philosophical than mournful.  It’s just something about the sound of unaccompanied voices singing these rich minor-mode harmonies, replete with the falling seconds that William Kimmel claims have signified death throughout the history of Western music.   I keep wanting to imagine the piece being performed in a remote church in the desert, even though in reality Zumaya was working at the Mexico City Cathedral.