Program Notes

Point/Counterpoint: Fuguing in Renaissance Music

“Counterpoint, that part of music most necessary to make good use of every other part, has for its aim not only the foundations of music, but perhaps even more, artifice and the most detailed subtleties of this art, which are fugues forwards and backwards, simple or double, imitations [echoes, etc.], canons, and perfidie [counterpoint over ostinato bass] and other elegances made like these, which, if used at the right time and place, adorn music marvelously.” Pietro della Valle, Della musica dell’età nostra… (1640), translated by Margaret Murata

Introduction and Definitions

Call it what you will—contrapuntal, polyphonic, fugal, imitative, canonic—the music that generated this program and makes up the greater part of the selections featured was in one form or another the highest achievement of the composers’ art from at least the middle of the fifteenth century right through to Johann Sebastian Bach in the eighteenth. One can trace its beginnings particularly with the works of Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410/25–1497), in which one sees the style of imitative polyphony at its most obvious onset, a style in which each voice of a polyphonic composition has equal weight, melodic significance, and shared thematic material. No viola parts in these works! However, we chose, as a chronological parameter and as a programmatic artifice, to begin with Jakob Obrecht’s commanding Fuga and follow the subsequent compositional journey up to J. S. Bach himself, presenting contrapuntally inspired and adorned music in much of its great variety. The program presents much more than just fugues, however, at least in the more limited definition that word seems to hold for most people today. A look at the word’s etymology and broader scope in late Medieval through Baroque compositional history is most instructive here. The root fug- has a long and surprisingly circumscribed meaning from its Indo-European origins through the present. Here is a part of that lineage: Origins in the Greek φυγή, ῆς, ἡ – fleeing, flight To the Latin fuga, -ae, f. – flight, running away Verbal forms in Latin: Fugio, -ere (intransitive) – to take to flight, run away Fugo, -are (transitive) – to put to flight, chase away Into French and English as early as at least the fifteenth century Fugue

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Throughout the history of its use the word sustains almost exclusively the intrinsic notion of flight, of fleeing. The Latin introduces verbs that give both a transitive and an intransitive sense, that is, both an action and a being acted upon. Both these senses, i.e., to chase and to flee, drive and help to explain fugal writing in the historical periods of this program. In the late Middle Ages, the term fuga was widely used to denote any works that displayed strict canonic form, such as the Fuga by Obrecht. However, to Medieval and Renaissance composers the word “canon” meant something rather different from our common use and conception. A fugue, in its early use, was a piece of composed music, perhaps even a single line as in the case of Obrecht’s work, wherein a particular melody is played in a number of voices, each voice introduced in turn by playing the same melody, albeit perhaps at a different interval. Canon, on the other hand, was the rule or more or less disguised direction for how the performer might turn the simple melody line into a full polyphonic texture of however many voices. The canon provided the intellectual game, the puzzle to be solved in the realization of the composer’s intent. Throughout the Renaissance, the word fugue came to denote specifically compositions that evinced thorough imitation in all parts, though not necessarily canonic in scope. Since the seventeenth century, the term has described what is commonly regarded as the most fully developed procedure of imitative counterpoint with its highly prescriptive form and compositional shape. It is the intent of this program in part to track this journey from fuga to fugue with the aim of demonstrating the wealth of musical forms, styles, and possibilities composed with the underlying notion of fleeing and chasing as progenitor. Before we launch into the specific pieces and composers in the program, however, we need to clarify the meanings and make distinctions among a few more musical terms, terms that are often bantered about with less precision of meaning than might be obvious or necessary. Polyphony Greek: πολυ – much, many & Φωνη – voice Generating Greek φημί (phēm., “to say, speak”) and φωνή (phonei, “voice, sound; any articulate sound, especially vowels) Counterpoint/Contrapunta – i.e., “punctus contra punctum” From Latin: contra – “opposite, against, facing” punctum (from pungo, -ere – “to prick, puncture”) – “point, small hole, puncture”; by transference, “a small portion of anything”

Canon

From Greek: κανών, -όνος, ὁ – “a rule, regulation, rule of conduct or doctrine; a measured (defined) area, province” Transliterated into Latin: canon, -onis. m. – “marking or measuring line; rule, model” Though the word “counterpoint” is frequently used interchangeably with “polyphony,” this is not strictly correct. The term “polyphony” refers generally to music consisting of two or more distinct melodic lines while “counterpoint” refers to the compositional techniques involved in the

handling of these melodic lines together. A polyphonic texture may be contrapuntal in a variety of ways, including fugal. There, are we speaking the same language now? One more point needs mentioning. All fugues are based on a single melody, or a melodic motif, or motives, shared within all parts of the composition. These melodies may be borrowed or newly composed. Both sources appear in Renaissance fugal writing. Borrowed material frequently came from the wealth of early Christian or Jewish chant, and appears mainly in the sacred spheres of mass, motet, hymn, and chorale. Newly composed melodic material generally appears in secular compositions most clearly exemplified in the canzona, madrigal, and the instrumental fantasy.

The Composers: The First Generation – Jakob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez

The latter years of the fifteenth century saw the emergence of a coterie of composers from the Franco-Flemish north—modern day Holland, Belgium, and the north of France—who both preserved and perfected late Medieval practice and built upon and transmitted the new contrapuntal techniques elaborated by their elder contemporary, Johannes Ockeghem. So prized were their talents that all the wealthy courts and cities in Italy, for instance, vied with one another to engage them as heads of their musical establishments. Called the “oltromontani,” “those from across the mountains,” i.e., the Alps, these northerners successfully planted the new contrapuntal ideas into Italian soil which grew into the international language of polyphony throughout Europe for decades to come.

One case in point was the d’Este court in Ferrara. Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara and distinguished patron of the arts in Italy, managed to land the already famous Josquin des Prez (Il Fantazies du Joskin) to become his maestro di capella early in 1503. However, an outbreak of the plague there prompted the evacuation of the ducal family and many of its citizens, whereas Josquin stayed until early in 1504. After his departure, he was succeeded by Jakob Obrecht, whose music Ercole I held in high regard. Obrecht himself, however, succumbed to the plague and died in Ferrara just before August of 1505. Following the auspicious beginning at the hands of these two renowned composers, the city of Ferrara remained a major center of musical composition, practice, and innovation throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. Obrecht represented most notably a late Medieval style which he brought to full culmination in his compositions. His ingenious Fuga, which begins this program and our fugal exploration, is case in point. Built on one line of music to be realized by three instrumentalists together with a canon for the creation of another, unwritten line, the piece becomes a highly successful four-part composition of intriguing complexity. The canon, or rule, clues the performer as to how to create the unwritten accompanying line in support of the written. It was the task of the performer to divine the part from the cryptic guide the canon provided, a game of intellect most admired and practiced throughout the Medieval period. The canon, or rule, for the missing line is written in Latin, the language of the literati. The statement tells the performer that each note of the line to be created equals six semibreves value of the

written notes and played at the octave. It doesn’t spell out the pitches to be played which must be deciphered based on the written line. This realized canon line provides a rudimentary harmony to the fugal lines above, something of a movable drone, much as might have served a discant line in late Medieval style.

Experimentation and Development

Numerous composers on this program contribute works that show both remnants of late Medieval style as well as evidence of the freer imitative developments of early-sixteenth-century polyphonic textures. An example of the former comes from Costanzo Festa, an Italian composer reputed to be the first native Italian polyphonist of international renown. He too had Ferrara connections, but eventually was hired in the service of Pope Leo X as singer in the Sistine Chapel choir where he remained for thirty years. Best known for his madrigals and sacred motets, he nevertheless wrote an astonishing set of 125 instrumental Controponti based on the famous “La Spagna” melody from two to as many as eleven voices. In that collection he displays his full polyphonic, contrapuntal erudition. The Controponto Ottogesima Prima on this program creates a strict fugal interaction between the tenor and bass lines at just a minim, or half note, apart from one another. This serves to ornament the “La Spagna” melody above played in long note values in the Altus, itself harmonized by the upper, Cantus voice in equally lengthy notes. The effect is striking and bridges the late Medieval and early Renaissance styles effectively. Another leg of our fugal exploration takes us from eleventh-century Burgundy to eighteenthcentury Leipzig and in fact to J. S. Bach himself, the means of transport the well-known Easter hymn Christ ist erstanden (“Christ is risen”). It is based on and derived from the original Latin Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes (“Praises for the paschal victim”), attributed to Wipo of Burgundy in the eleventh century. The hymn was itself transformed into a Leise in the twelfth century. The Leise was a devotional, German stanzaic song with refrain found particularly in the later Middle Ages. It’s assumed to have derived its name from the words of the opening section of the Mass, “Kyrie eleison,” which words often appeared repeated in the verse refrains of the song. In the early stages of specifically German polyphony, beginning with the lost earlyfifteenth-century Strasbourg manuscript, Leisen were often transformed into multiple-voiced, polyphonic compositions. The earliest known such polyphonic setting of the Leise on Christ ist erstanden to have survived is found in the Glogauer Liederbuch, dating from the 1480s, a three-voice version in late Medieval style. The melody lies uncharacteristically in the top voice and is embellished in florid, improvisational style in the two lower voices. The subsequent setting by Heinrich Isaac expands to four voices and places the melody in the more usual tenor voice, though the opening phrase appears in imitation in all the voices. Isaac’s setting, however, maintains some of the florid counterpoint of the Glogauer version. In both of these settings the Kyrie eleison is replaced by the simple Alleluia. Heinrich Finck, a well-known composer and younger contemporary of Isaac, expanded the Leise setting further to five voices, keeping the melody in the tenor, while achieving a more thoroughly

imitative style in all voices, bridging the gap between late Medieval and early Renaissance compositional efforts. Such is also the case with the setting by Stephan Mahu, whose works include some contrapuntal settings of German songs à 4 and 5, both sacred and secular. His five-part Christ ist erstanden setting is unusual for its scoring of four voices in the tenor range and one in the bass, containing the tessitura of the composition in a tightly knit aural spectrum resulting in a dense texture. Given that one of Mahu’s sacred songs, Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allen (“Praise God, all you Christians”), inveighs against the abuses of the Roman church, and that he contributed a five-voice setting of Martin Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg (“A mighty Fortress”) to Georg Rhau’s Geistliche Gesange (“Sacred Songs”) of 1544, it seems likely that despite being a Catholic, Mahu was not unsympathetic to Lutheran ideals. A major bend in the road occurred with the founding of the Reformation in Germany in 1517 under the leadership of Martin Luther. Though he jettisoned some of the excess baggage the Roman Church had amassed over the centuries, Luther nevertheless maintained many of its musical and liturgical traditions. Under his influence, and with the help of his close friend and colleague, Johann Walter, the Leise on Christ ist erstanden was transformed into a liturgical hymn for congregational use. In so doing, elements of the original Easter sequence melody were reinstated, as well as, most notably, the Kyrie eleison of the early Leise traditions. Walter was himself a prolific and accomplished composer who supplied the emerging Reformed, i.e., Lutheran, church with a wealth of musical treasures, in both hymnic and polyphonic motet styles. Moving beyond the sixteenth century, Walter’s contributions to the emerging Lutheran church were matched and even exceeded by the more well-known Michael Praetorius, composer, publisher, theorist, and arranger, whose respect for Walter’s works led him to include many in his own publications in the early 1600s. Praetorius provided numerous chorale-based settings of various hymn tunes that served the church’s pedagogical aims and needs. His chorale setting of Christ ist erstanden is a characteristic seventeenth-century marker on the road to those of Bach himself, the example of which ends this leg of the journey. Bach borrowed not only from the world of received sacred music, but from the secular as well. The next set of pieces exemplifies that clearly. The great Franco-Flemish-born composer, Heinrich Isaac, who nevertheless spent most of his career under Maximilian I in Germany, penned a sweet and heartfelt song, Isprugk ich muess dich lassen (“Innsbruck, I must leave you”) upon a necessary departure from the beloved town of Innsbruck in modern-day Austria. The song’s melancholy melody reflects the sadness that departure evoked. Bach was so enamored of this melody that he borrowed it for at least four different settings—each with a different harmonization and using from four to seven voices—under the title O Welt, ich muss ich lassen (“O World, I must leave you”). Our presentation, however, reflects Renaissance practice with bagpipes, recorder, lute, and krumhorns, instruments very popular in Isaac’s day. The basis of Isaac’s four-part composition here lies in the strict fugue between the tenor and bass voices. Above that, Isaac harmonizes the fugue in the two upper voices.

Another major trajectory in this fugal exploration lies in the early Christian hymn A solis ortus cardine (“From the point of the sun’s rising”). Attributed to Coelius Sedulius (d. 450), the text narrates the life of Christ from birth to resurrection in twenty-three verses, each one starting with a consecutive letter of the Latin alphabet, a technique called abecedarius or “alphabet song.” The first seven verses related the events of the birth and thus became in the Medieval period a separate Christmas hymn in the Roman liturgical calendar. Subsequently, Martin Luther translated this hymn for use in the Reformed church, giving it the title Christum wir sollen loben schon (“We should now praise Christ…”), which became the principal Lutheran Christmas hymn until recently when the publication of the 1955 Evangelisches Gesangbuch (“Evangelican hymnbook”) left it out.

The first four-voice polyphonic treatment of this early-fifth-century monophonic hymn appears to be the anonymous setting from the late fifteenth century on this program. It preserves the contour of the original melody, distributing the opening, stepwise rising fifth, D to A, in slow note values throughout the voices, vividly depicting the sun’s gradual emergence over the horizon. The original chant melody appears in the tenor voice, as was a customary style of the time, with elaboration in the remaining three parts. Johann Walter’s four-voice setting of the Lutheran hymn that follows maintains this treatment in a late Medieval style while altering the melody of the anonymous setting slightly. In addition, he embellishes the melody, particularly in the alto and bass lines, with appropriately florid counterpoint. His five-part setting represents a step toward the more equal-voiced contrapuntal tyle of the early Renaissance polyphonic practice, much in the manner of Heinrich Finck. The melody still lies in the tenor voice, yet snippets of the melody sound from all the voices in this overlapping, imitative texture, providing the compositional framework for the whole.

The chorale setting by Michael Praetorius reverts to the Latin text, A solis ortus cardine, and moves the melody to the top voice, as regularly occurred throughout later sixteenth-century treatments of earlier material. The writing is much more chordal and homorhythmic, and thus more singable for a congregation of untrained voices, as was Luther’s desire. Even more altered, and imaginative, is the canzona-like setting by the renowned organist and composer, Samuel Scheidt, a younger contemporary and colleague of Praetorius, from his collection of organ works, the Tablatura Nova published in 1619. The familiar melody now lies almost intact in the alto voice while the other three voices of this four-voice texture literally dance above and below it. Melody no longer predominates. Instead, Scheidt allows himself to enjoy flights of fancy based on the ostinato of the opening rising figure from the original chant. Finally, Bach himself drew upon the Lutheran hymn to compose an entire cantata with Luther’s German text reinstated. The concluding chorale of this cantata is emblematic of Bach’s creative genius, and a fitting culmination to this part of our exploration. His harmonizations, replete with chromatic adventure, bear witness to his unique vision. Nevertheless, in homage to his source material he preserves the modal beginning, Dorian, and ending, Phrygian, of the original chant.

Another striking example of very early Renaissance fugal and contrapuntal writing was penned by Thomas Stoltzer, a supporter of the Reformation who was appointed magister capellae at the Habsburg court of Hungary. Probably born in Silesia, a region of central Europe, the details of his early life are largely unknown. However, his compositions were very highly regarded, most of them published and admired nevertheless only after his death in 1526. A prolific composer, he wrote a collection of eight instrumental pieces in five-part settings, the Octo Tonorum Melodiae, one each on each of the eight psalm tones of the Roman church, demonstrating the possibilities of the developing contrapuntal techniques of his day. The one on this program on the seventh tone, i.e., on the tone G, expands the practice of imitation by using the contrapuntal principles of augmentation and diminution, an early example of the practice. The Altus voice introduces the melody at leisurely note values while at the same time the Discantus, or upper voice, replicates the melody but at half the note values, thus moving twice as fast. Throughout the piece, this feature and others shows Stoltzer at full mastery of his contrapuntal technique, creating a work of compelling effect in the motet style of his day. Stoltzer’s work achieved a successful melding of late Medieval technique and predilections with the emerging imitative counterpoint of the early Renaissance. The next generation of composers, represented notably by Orlande de Lassus, brought the style to a point of perfection. While serving Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria and his son William V in Munich for most of his career, Lassus achieved international acclaim as one of the most gifted purveyors of imitative polyphony of his generation. His Musica, Dei donum optimi (literally and colloquially “Music, God’s gift, He’s the best”) not only evinces his love and devotion to his profession, but also displays his near perfection of the genre. With Lassus, and his contemporaries Palestrina, Victoria, and Guerrero, the international language of sacred mass and motet reached a pinnacle in contrapuntal writing. Little more remained to be achieved within the style. There was need for something new and one of those new elements was chromaticism, the bold use of notes outside the gamut, or range of acceptable notes. Lassus’s chief contributions to this new direction lay in his collection entitled Prophetiae Sibyllarum (“Prophecies of the Sibyls”), an extraordinary collection of twelve songs with a prologue. The Sibylline Prophecies of the title are the work of second-century authors apocryphally attributed to the legendary Sibyls, ancient Greek prophetesses. The texts, which purport to foretell the birth of Christ, were accepted as genuine by Saint Augustine and other early Christian thinkers, giving the Sibyls a status equal to that of Old Testament prophets. Michelangelo painted five of the Sibyls onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in 1508 to 1512. The Prologue, the Carmina Chromatico, whose text may have been written by Lassus himself, reads in translation: “Polyphonic songs which you hear with a chromatic tenor / these are they in which our twice-six sibyls once sang with fearless mouth the secrets of salvation.” Lassus responded immediately to the idea of “chromaticism” with a series of somewhat jarring, yet successful, progressions. Within the opening nine measures of this prologue, he uses all twelve chromatic pitches of the octave and builds triads on ten different roots, bursting the bounds of the traditional gamut beyond recognition and opening the doors to bold harmonic invention.

Emergence of formal features – The High Renaissance

Several pieces on the program carry the story of fugal development into the later Renaissance period, and for that we move to Italy and explore the canzona, an Italian instrumental form derived from the Franco-Flemish and Parisian vocal chanson. An early proponent of this form was Costanzo Antegnati. He was born in Brescia in northern Italy into a prolific family of organists and organ builders. The Antegnati organ, built in 1581 for the friars of St. Joseph’s Church in Brescia, was at the time the largest and most famous in Europe. Costanzo the son is most famous for the work L’arte organica (1608) which provides technical details for 144 organs built by his family, rules about the tuning of organs and harpsichords, and advice regarding organ registration. Costanzo Antegnati was himself an organist for many years and composed both sacred and secular works, the latter mostly madrigals. However, as organist he most certainly was called upon to improvise at the keyboard, and the canzona would have been one form available to him and imitative polyphony the style most appropriate to the form. His Canzon La borga may have originated as just such an improvisation, though it has been passed on to posterity as a fourvoice composition. The opening imitative melodic motif shared by all voices displays the dactylic metrical unit, i.e., long-short-short, ubiquitous in the chanson literature and almost de rigeur throughout the history of the canzona. The fugal imitation is striking, clearly a formal element in the work, building a couple of prominent unmistakable motives into a unified whole. The Canzona Prima by the Italian Claudio Merulo, another great organist of the High Renaissance, carries this technical display into a five-part texture and adds yet a third motif to the emerging fugal structure. Born in Correggio as Claudio Merlotti, he Latinized his surname when he became famous in Venetian cultural clubs. A prolific composer, he was most famous for his innovative keyboard music and his ensemble music composed in the Venetian polychoral style. At this point it’s important to point out two aspects of fugal practice that emerged throughout the sixteenth century. The first is the consort principle in which each voice of a polyphonic composition, whether vocally conceived or intended for instruments, was ideally performed on consorts of like instruments, certainly under the influence of the SATB voices of a choir. The keyboard most easily accomplished this, the organ especially with its various registrations mimicking the sounds of the many individual instruments of the Renaissance instrumentarium. Instrument builders were compelled to produce all their instruments, from shawms to lutes, in all the various sizes from large to small to achieve this goal. In this program this principle has been heard most notably in consorts of recorders and krumhorns. The Renaissance loud band, however, was an exception to the rule, as it developed its prominence throughout Europe and beyond through a combination of reeds and brass, the shawms, sackbuts, and dulcians (e.g., Stoltzer, Octo Tonorum Melodiae: Septimi Toni and Lassus, Musica, Dei donum optimi). This made most sense from a practical point of view. Soprano trombones were much less than satisfactory, near impossible to play in tune, and six-foot-long bass shawms were a bit unwieldy, especially when the bands had to participate in outdoor processionals. The portability,