Let your ears be attentive

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine;
Domine, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuæ intendentes
In vocem deprecationis meæ.
Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, Domine, quis sustinebit?
Quia apud te propitiatio est; et propter legem tuam sustinui te, Domine.
Sustinuit anima mea in verbo ejus:

Speravit anima mea in Domino.
A custodia matutina usque ad noctem, speret Israël in Domino.
Quia apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio.
Et ipse redimet Israël ex omnibus iniquitatibus ejus.

From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplication.
If you, Lord, were to mark iniquities, who, O Lord, shall stand?
For with you is forgiveness; and because of your law, I stood by you, Lord.
My soul has stood by his word.
My soul has hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch, even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.
For with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. 

And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

The penitential words of Psalm 130 have struck a chord with many composers over the centuries. Over the coming days I will introduce you to some of the finest settings. This post will introduce some of the best Renaissance settings...

...beginning with two absolute beauties from Josquin des Prez. 

Josquin set the psalm twice. The De Profundis a 4 (above) is set on the medieval modal scale beginning on E known as the Phrygian, which can be played on the piano using only the white notes (E F G A B C D E). The unusual feature of this is that, unlike with our modern major and minor keys, there is a semitone at the start of the scale (a 'flattened second'). This gives it a more mysterious quality. No other mode (except for the unused Locrian mode beginning on B) has such an opening interval. The scale is also much closer to our modern E minor than it is to our modern E major, so it sounds like a darker version of E minor. The piece falls into two main sections, breaking between  "Domino" and "A custodia matutina" . Otherwise, as so much of the music of Josquin's phase of the Renaissance does, the piece generally flows seamlessly without breaks at cadences, one phrase flowing into the next. Texturally, the piece moves between having all four voices sounding together or having them pair off (the higher ones tending to stick together, and likewise the lower ones). 

Josquin's De Profundis a 5 is, I think, even more beautiful. Three of the five voices - the Superius (soprano), Primus Contratenor (first alto) and Tenor (tenor!) - are joined in canon. The Superius leads, the Tenor follows at the unison two bars later, and the Primus Contratenor joins in a fourth below. Can you hear this? Yes, but you will have to concentrate! The serenity of this setting makes it very special.

Moving on a century, the De Profundis by the Spanish-born master of Portuguese late Renaissance polyphony Estêvão Lopes Morago begins with the same melodic phrase which opened Josquin's first setting. However, as you will soon hear, his music conveys a much greater sense of anguish than Josquin's because of the composer's remarkable use of dissonance. There is a major-tinted tonal brightening at "exaudi vocem meam", reflecting the hope contained in the words.

Another masterpiece of Renaissance polyphony, written roughly half way between Josquin and Morago and worthy to stand alongside the two pieces by Josquin, is the beautiful De Profundis of Orlande de Lassus, one of his Penitential Psalms. (Go to 38.53 on the link). Unlike the Josquin pieces, Lassus's setting is easier to follow as he breaks up the seamless flow found in the older composer's polyphony and replaces it with music that takes each phrase of the text and treats it almost as a separate entity, with a clear cadence at the end of each sentence. The music regularly seems to pause for reflection. There is also less of the pervasive imitative writing found in the Josquin (though there are canons buried in the texture), with a greater sense of variety as regards style. 

Instruments began playing an increasing roll in late Renaissance choral music, readying themselves for the Baroque. Leading the way in this regard was Andrea Gabrieli (Giovanni's uncle). Gabrieli's 6-part De Profundis (above) was almost certainly meant for a mix of voices and instruments, all the better to ring out across the wide spaces of St. Mark's Cathedral, Venice. Please listen out for the upward leap of an octave in four of the six voices near the very beginning of the piece, painting the word "clamavi".

Gabrieli's Dutch contemporary, our old friend Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, wrote a particularly lovely 5-part setting of De Profundis, without instruments. The textures, however, are richly sonorous. The piece includes imitative and homophonic passages and is as sensitive to the meaning of the text as Lassus's. Its effect is direct.

As Sweelinck was seemingly a Protestant (probably a Calvinist), this might be the time to introduce Martin Luther's paraphrase of Psalm 130, Aus der Tiefe ruf ich, Herr, zu dir. There is an exceptionally fine setting of his words by the great Heinrich Schütz. His Aus der Tiefe, SWV25 comes from that early period of his music when the influence of his teacher, Giovanni Gabrieli, was making itself manifest. (You can follow the text here). Even more clearly than with Lassus, here each phrase of the setting is marked out as an individual event, making its sense ring directly in the ears and the imagination of each listener. As an example of word-painting, listen out for the way the word harre ("wait") is set at "Ich harre des Herren". As ever, Schütz's choral textures regularly change colour and the predominantly chordal music also admits touches of polyphony. It is a fabulous piece.

With Schütz we have entered the world of the Baroque. The Baroque Age saw a great surge in settings of the psalm...about which more in the not too distant future. 

Catching incense

As I've explored more and more music from the past thousand years, I've found that I've ended up liking music from each and every era. As composer after composer and period after period fell into place (some more easily than others), I found that the last period of music to fall was the Renaissance - specifically Renaissance choral polyphony. I was OK with music from Dufay (first half of the 15th century) backwards and from Monteverdi (very end of the 16th century) onwards, but the music of that age that spread from roughly 1450 through to 1600 seemed hard to penetrate. It all sounded much the same to me, whether it be a Kyrie by Ockeghem, a Credo by Josquin or a Sanctus by Byrd. Instrumental music, Renaissance songs, homophonic choral music were fine, but unaccompanied choral polyphony all drifted through my ears without engaging my understanding. I felt as if I were hearing the same bland cloud of musical incense in pretty much every piece. I gave it time, however, and listened again and again and eventually it clicked with certain composers - Gesualdo, Victoria, Tallis - and the light then spread ever wider, until even Ockeghem, Josquin and Byrd fell. And when they fell, I could for the life of me think why I didn't love their music earlier. It was so beautiful, so masterful, so full of imagination.

I've tried to fathom it out ever since, and I now think I have an explanation.

The music of Dufay and, before him (going backwards in time), Dunstable and Machaut and Perotin and Hildegard is more immediate in its melodic appeal - as is the music of the Gabrielis and Monteverdi from the other end of the period and on. In other words, it's more tuneful. The emphasis was on melody because the melody the composers wanted their listeners to hear was placed where it could be heard most clearly - at the top of the texture. In a four-part piece, say, the sopranos (or more accurately 'superius') would have the tune, the tenors would have a plainchant melody to accompany it, the basses would provide a harmonic foundation and the altos would fill in the gaps (to put it simply!). The uppermost line - the one the ear catches onto easiest - was supreme. Come Ockeghem and Josquin - and those who came in their wake across the length and breadth of Europe - and this changed. All four voices became musically interesting in their own right and stopped specialising. The topmost line lost its primacy (however much its brightness of sound seems to magnetically draw our ears to it.) All lines were equal, and none were meant to be more equal than others (well, most of the time!). Therefore, it's not so easy to hear tunes because tunefulness isn't what the music's about.You are listening instead to a flow of harmony, expressed through interweaving lines. It's a luminous web of counterpoint. The lines are usually beautiful in their own right, but you don't (for the most part) hear them in their own right. They are blended. I'm sure many of you have had little difficulty in just enjoying hearing this blending of voices as they float dreamily across a stained-glass window, or the face of your radio. I'm afraid I need more. When I started following individual lines or listening to the flow of harmony, the clicking process began. After all, counterpoint where (say) four voices interweave and none has primacy is pretty much what Bach was about when writing his fugues. There's no reason why anyone who loves Bach fugues shouldn't take to Renaissance polyphony as well, is there?

Well, as I loved Bach fugues and yet didn't take to Renaissance polyphony anywhere near so readily, there must be more to it than that. What?

Well, composers before and after this period phrased their pieces in a different way to the composers of this period. The key is the way melodic phrases reach their cadences. Listen to Machaut or Dufay, for example, and you hear long, clearly-shaped melodic phrases built from distinctive shorter phrases, whereas with Ockeghem and Josquin the phrases seem to wander around without purpose. With Machaut and Dufay there are clear, punctuating cadences to which these phrases lead, whereas with Ockeghem and Josquin the cadences just seem to turn up - plus we have to wait longer for them to arrive. As a result, the feel of tonal-sounding harmony (which does seem to be something people respond to easily, even in modal music) is much less strong in the music from the heart of the Renaissance age than in any other period up till the 20th century. The freedom of the bass voice is another factor in the undermining of the sense we tonally-attuned modern types have of familiar tonal-sounding harmony in the music of Ockeghem, Josquin and Co. None of these 'problems' exists with a Bach fugue.

So, the music of the period I'm describing is less obviously tuneful and less harmonically familiar than either the music that preceded it or the music that succeeded it. (Yes, I know Machaut's music sounds unfamiliar too, but the unfamiliarity seems almost modern - unlike the unfamiliarity of the Renaissance masters). It is also far less concerned with contrast, especially as regards texture. That, I believe, is why I found it hard to come to terms with for so long. It seemed simultaneously strange and boring. Spend time with it though and it will surely cast its spell over you. Then it will cease to be strange and become anything but boring. The counterpoint can nourish the imagination, the entwining melodic lines carrying you along on one voice after another through lovely harmonies. 

Hopefully, you 'got it' much more quickly than me!

As examples of what I mean, please compare Dufay's motet Ave regina caelorum with the Kyrie from Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum or the Kyrie from Josquin's Missa l'Homme Armé. Or compare the Kyrie of Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame with Ockeghem's mesmeric Deo Gratias. (Some truly stunning music here!)