MIT Chamber Chorus, William Cutter, music director, Karen Harvey, organ, present: Picardy Thirds, 400 years of optimistic cadences. The program will include works of Perotinus, John Dunstable, Josquin des Prez, Claudin de Sermisy, John Dowland, and Schütz, Musikalische Exequien (Funeral music for Count Henry II) and an arrangement of Viderunt omnes by MIT Prof. Michael Cuthbert.
MIT CHAMBER CHORUS
William Cutter, Director' Karen Harvey, Accompanist
Sopranos
Caitlin Kerr
Sarah Nathaniel
Tiffany Wong
Alice Venancio Marques Serra
Altos
Jacquelyn De Sa
Chelsea Levy
Margaret Pavlovich
Varsha Raghavan
Emily TenCate
Hannah Wood
Tenors
Bhaskar Balaji
Jiahao Chen
Benjamin Horkley
Dominique Hoskin
Jan-Christian Hütter
Tej Kanwar
Mitchell Lee
Chris Kevin Ong
Anthony Sciarretta
Basses
Peter Chamberlain
Christopher Follet
Nicholas Garcia
Benjamin Gunby
Diego Mendoza-Halliday
Kevin King
Anthony Thomas
Troy Welton
Lawson Wong
Notes on the Program
Pérotin (fl. c. 1200), also called Perotin the Great, believed to be French, lived around the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century. He was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the ars antiqua style. He was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions.
The prominent feature of his compositional style was the “tenor” which was an existing melody from the liturgical repertoire (in this case the “Viderunt omnes”) which literally “holds” the melody of the Gregorian chant while the other voices sing florid lines against the tenor sung in sustained tones.
Viderunt omnes
All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God
English composer, John Dunstable, influenced the transition between late medieval and early Renaissance music. The influence of his sweet, sonorous music was recognized by his contemporaries on the Continent, including Martin le Franc, who wrote in his Champion des dames (c. 1440) that the leading composers of the day, Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois, owed their superiority to what they learned from Dunstable’s “English manner.”
Dunstable’s influence on European music is seen in his flowing, gently asymmetrical rhythms and, above all, in his harmonies. He represents a culmination of the English tradition of full, sonorous harmonies based on the third and sixth that persisted through the 14th century alongside the starker, more dissonant style of continental music.
“Quam pulchra es” is remarkable for its extreme control of dissonance – Dunstable allows only nine dissonant notes in the whole piece, and these are treated with textbook exactitude. However, despite the prohibition of spicy notes, the piece never succumbs to blandness. Its sonorous, rich textures – once again rife with major thirds – are striking, especially when compared to earlier music that was both more harmonically austere and looser with its treatment of dissonance. Given that the Song of Song setting is essentially an erotic poem, Dunstable’s sensuous musical language is clearly appropriate.
Quam pulchra es - Dunstable
Male: How beautiful thou art, and how graceful, my dearest in delights. Your stature I would compare to a palm tree, and your breasts to clusters of grapes. Your head is like Mount Carmel, your neck just like a tower of ivory.
Female: Come my love, let us go into the field, and see whether the flowers have yielded fruit, and whether the apples of Tyre are in bloom. There will I give my breasts to you.
Many “modern” musical compositional practices were being born in the era of 1500. Josquin des Prez work shows particular awareness of the contrapuntal complexity of the Netherlanders and the homophonic textures of the Italians that were happening during this time.
El grillo employs an ingenious use of simple root position chords infused with infectious rhythms and zesty textual repetitions (which later becomes “patter-song”) in a delightful satirical portrait of this whimsical insect.
The cricket is a good singer
Who can hold a long note
Of drinking the cricket sings
The cricket is a good singer
But he doesn’t do what birds do,
After they’ve sung a bit,
They go somewhere else,
The cricket always stays put
And when the weather is hottest
He sings solely for love
Sermisy, though a priest, composed wildly successful secular music including the genre of the Parisian chanson. Tant que vivray was designed as social music intended to be performed by educated musicians (those who could read music) for a variety of social settings ranging from the court to a merchant’s home.
Tant que vivray
So long as I live in a flourishing age, I will serve love’s powerful god,
In actions and words, in songs and harmonies.
Many times (he) left me languishing, but after mourning made me rejoice,
Since I have the love of a beautiful woman with a find body.
An alliance with her…that’s my pledge: Her heart is mine, mine is hers:
Boo to sadness, love live joy, since in love there is so much good.
When I want to serve her, and honor her,
When the fine scripts (I) want to decorate her name,
When I see her, and visit her often, envious people just murmur about it.
But our love won’t therefore endure less; so far or further will the wind carry it.
Despite envy all my life I will love her and I will sing,
“She is the first, she is the last that I have served, and will serve.”
John Dowland worked during a time of musical transition and absorbed many of the new ideas he had encountered on the Continent. His 88 lute songs (printed 1597–1612) particularly reflect those influences. The early songs are presented with an alternative version for four voices. Possessing enchanting melodies, they show simple strophic settings, often in dance forms, with an almost complete absence of chromaticism.
Heinrich Schütz is generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach and often considered to be one of the most important composers of the 17th century.
Schütz's compositions show the influence of his teacher Gabrieli (displayed most notably with Schütz's use of resplendent polychoral and concertato styles) and of Monteverdi, especially in regard to text painting. Additionally, the influence of the Netherlandish composers of the 16th century is prominent in his work. His best known works are in the field of sacred music, ranging from solo voice with instrumental accompaniment to a cappella choral music.
The Musikalische Exequien was written for the burial service of Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss, a nobleman whom Schütz had probably counted as a friend from 1616 or 1617. Although the music was commissioned by Posthumus’ widow and sons after his death in December of 1635, it had been planned in some detail by Heinrich Posthumus himself well before his death. His will specifies the texts to be set and the character of the music to be used in setting them, as well as the decorations on his coffin and the positioning of the attendants and participants in the service.
The first, and by far the longest, section of the Exequien, the Concert in the Form of a German Burial Mass, manages to be, at one and the same time, a sacred concerto of the Italian/German type that Schütz essentially invented single- handedly, and a marvelous simulacrum of a Latin Mass, right down to the textural and mood changes typical of the various sections. The quasi-chant incipits set the Latinate tone.
The remaining sections of the Exequien contrast with and reinforce the solemn Concert. By abandoning soloistic writing, the Motet for two four-part choruses paradoxically creates a feeling of great intimacy. The choice of setting would seem to be saying: As King David was alone, in his composition of this Psalm, all of us are essentially alone when confronting our God; and yet shared faith makes of us a community, a harmonious interplay, of the faithful. The tension between the searching questions that underlie the text—who am I, what do I have, for what can I hope—and the firm answers that the text provides, can be heard in the antiphonal passages of the setting, the calling, self-answering and repetition that finally swell together in confirmation.
The Canticum, with which the Exequien end, is, in all its brevity, the most astonishing and moving example of the many-layeredness of this work as a whole. The scoring is for a five-voice, rather low-register chorus, against a solo trio of two sopranos and a baritone. Schütz’s directions call for the first group to sing near the organ, and the trio to be situated at a distance. The five-part chorus sings the serene Canticle of Simeon, whose acceptance of death comes with the recognition of a new life, that of the infant Jesus. The trio, whom Schütz describes as the blessed soul of the departed in heaven (the baritone) accompanied by the Holy Ghost and an angel (both sopranos), sings a text from Revelation and another from the Book of Wisdom.
Jeffrey Thomas
