Matthias Grünewald, "Concert of Angels and Nativity"

It is one of the best known texts in the Bible, taken from the nativity scene penned by Luke: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid… And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will towards men.’”

The association with the opening of the Gloria section, which begins with the italicized words above, is unmistakeable.  It announces that the Gloria will deal with the second person of the Trinity: Jesus Christ, the Son.

Although this is a short movement, which is directly linked to the following “Et in terra pax”, it contains some of the most joyful music that Bach ever wrote.  Listen to the opening bars, which feature the trumpets, heard for the first time in the Mass, sharing this fanfare figure:

Opening of Gloria in excelsis Deo

It is no surprise that Bach would have featured the trumpets for this movement.  As the Christmas carol relates, the angels are heralds of the coming of Christ the King—as such, they are represented by the instrument that was used to herald the approach of earthly kings.  Considering that Bach wrote his 1733 Missa (the Kyrie and Gloria together) as a petition to the Dresden elector to be appointed court composer, there is a hint of currying favor in making the connection here!  After all, Bach composed a good deal of similar music to be performed in the Leipzig town square when visiting royalty would come through.

When the singers enter at the end of the instrumental ritornello, they sing the same fanfare presented first by the trumpets, suggesting that we might be in for the kind of Choreinbau that we found in the opening Kyrie I.

Gloria in excelsis: vocal entry

This turns out to be the case.  Bach grafts vocal parts onto the original instrumental ones, creating great unity of form as well as a terrific sense of expectant excitement.

The construction of this movement is remarkably taut: aside from the fanfare figure, the bulk of the rest of the musical material is a joyful series of sixteenth-note figures, often jumping off a tie to create even more syncopated energy, capturing the breathless scene of the shepherds and angels.

Enjoy this clip of the Thomaskirche boys singing the exhilarating opening of the Gloria in excelsis.

In fact, it’s a good idea to survey the movements of the Gloria in close proximity to one another, because it’s important not to lose sight of the unified nature of Bach’s setting. In the same way that the Kyrie was a study of both the Trinity and the quality of God’s mercy, the Gloria is an extended song of praise, as well as what I consider to be a catalog of the attributes of Christ—the second person of the Trinity.

These are the movements in the Gloria section, which was composed alongside the Kyrie in 1733 as an “application” to the Dresden court to be named court composer:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
Et in terra pax
Laudamus te
Gratias agimus tibi
Domine Deus
Qui tollis peccata mundi
Qui sedes ad deteram Patris
Quoniam tu solus sanctus
Cum sancto spiritu

Without delving too long on my recurring theme of the Trinity, it is interesting to note that Bach divides the Gloria into nine movements—a “trinity of trinities”.

But it is even more interesting to note the distribution of the solo movements and their instrumental accompaniments. In these, we see that Bach carefully represents each soloist once, and each section of ensemble once—strings, flute, oboe, corno di caccia (representing the brass). This certainly suggests a careful organization, not dissimilar to the solo distributions in the two Passion settings, and wholly unlike the cantatas, in which rarely seems at pains to offer such equality of assignments.

Laudamus te—Sop II, violin solo
Domine Deus—Sop I and Tenor, flute solo
Qui sedes ad deteram Patris—Alto, oboe solo
Quoniam tu solus sanctus—Bass, corno di caccia solo

As I will discuss for each movement over the next seven postings, I believe that each movement reflects one aspect of Christ’s nature. Here is a preview of that catalog of attributes:

Gloria in excelsis Deo—the heralding of Christ’s advent
Et in terra pax—Prince of Peace
Laudamus te—worthy of praise
Gratias agimus tibi—worthy of thanksgiving
Domine Deus—indivisibility from Father
Qui tollis peccata mundi—giver of mercy
Qui sedes ad deteram Patris—king of kings
Quoniam tu solus sanctus—administered by the Holy Spirit

Our job over this next week is to see how Bach illustrates all of these attributes musically, binding them together through the catalog-like organization of the nine movements.

As always, the idea of the Trinity spirals through this section devoted to the Son; just as the Kyrie was in a large sense about God the Father, the Gloria concerns God the Son, but contains all three indivisible.

Audio clip of Bassetto section of Kyrie II

In Bach’s music, there are occasionally extended sections in which the bass parts (both vocal and instrumental) disappear for a time.  This technique is referred to as bassetto, since for those sections, the tenors (or a tenor-range instrument) become the “little bass” section.

Eric Chafe has discussed Bach’s use of bassetto sections to represent God’s love.  Nowhere is this more beautifully seen than in the soprano aria, “Aus Liebe will mein Jesus sterben” from the St Matthew Passion, the translation of which is:

Out of love my Savior wants to die, He knows nothing of a single sin, so that the eternal destruction and the punishment of judgment would not remain upon my soul.

Even just listening to the very beginning of this clip reveals that it is different from Bach’s usual orchestral sound: there is no basso continuo; instead, a pair of oboes d’amore play the lowest part, accompanying the flute, and later the soprano.

On one level, I certainly agree with the Chafe that this use of bassetto can represent love.  But I would like to suggest another level of meaning for the absence of the proper bass part.

In the system of theological rhetoric of the Baroque, the lowest part is associated with the “hand of God”, since in Baroque music, all of the music is generated from the harmonic foundation of the basso continuo.

So in my interpretation of Bach’s vocal works, I have often wondered if the absence of the basso continuo is meant to represent the absence of God, when he has to turn away from sin.  The placement of this aria in the St Matthew Passion fits this idea, since it comes just before Christ is crucified.  Jesus cries from the cross, “Father why have you forsaken me?”—the absence of God the Father.

So… I wonder if maybe this bassetto section in the Kyrie II, where the upper three parts are wrestling with the “cross” figure, and anticipating the “mercy” figure, is meant to represent the crucifixion itself—an act that was followed by mercy.

Who knows?  As I keep saying, it’s so hard to know just how much Bach intended to encode in his music.  But I still believe that the process of trying to understand all of it only helps to enrich one’s understanding of the more obvious sections.

In the next post, we finally leave behind the Kyrie and move onto the far more joyful Gloria!

Nicolas Poussin, Christ and the Adulteress, 1640

I realize that I didn’t exactly leave things on a happy note in the last post!  I can’t apologize for that—one needn’t read very much Martin Luther to understand that the “renegade monk” definitely shared a hard message, and Bach is undoubtedly a Lutheran in the sense that he doesn’t shy away from the difficult stuff either.

However, the cross of the Kyrie II isn’t the end of the musical story.  It’s true that for much of the movement, the music seems mired in the thorny chromaticism of the opening motive, reinforced by a modal harmony that is unsettled and archaic.

You may remember that in the Kyrie I, we saw that Bach depicted man’s struggles with anxious music that tried (with only limited success) to break free of its “musical bondage” by reaching upwards towards God, but being continually dragged down again.  The same dynamic is at work in this Kyrie setting as well; through the use of the narrow-ranged chromaticism, Bach represents the sinner “spinning his wheels”, trying to reach upwards, but returning back to where he started.

In the Kyrie I, when the music did finally free itself from the chains of the repeated melodic figure, it did so with a large leap, whose following downward phrase represented God “meeting man halfway”.  I think the same thing happens in the Kyrie II with the secondary “mercy” phrase.  Like the first Kyrie, there is a hint of syncopation to it, adding a sense of metrical urgency and even a bit of relief.  Here is the phrase, which begins appropriately enough in the bass part, where the “cross” motive had begun:

Just like the “cross” motive, this is passed around the voice parts, rising to the tenor, then alto, then soprano.

Audio clip of “mercy” motive

I like to think of this as the “mercy” motive, since to me, it feels like the answer to the singers’ call for mercy—a descending figure that feels like a blessing after the angst of the “cross” motive.

As you surely know by now, I can’t talk about any of these movements without trotting out my theory about the B Minor Mass and the doctrine of the Trinity!  I’ve mentioned some links in this movement already—the cross relating to Jesus, the use of stile antico related to the Holy Spirit, since the Spirit often represents the church.  And in a moment, I’ll talk about a particularly far-fetched theory about one section of the movement.

However, before that, there is one other idea that I have about this “mercy” figure relating to the Trinity.

Of the 75 cantatas that I conducted with the Sydneian Bach Choir & Orchestra in Sydney, one that cantata really stood out for the wealth of its musico-theological language was BWV7, Christ unser Herr.  This cantata deals with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

Andrea del Verrocchio, Baptism of Christ, ca 1742-45

As a sacrament, baptism deals with purification and being born anew.  Baptism also concerns the Trinity.  When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, all three “persons” were present: God the Father announced that Jesus is his son, and the Spirit is present as a dove.

I mention all of this because I believe that second motive of the Kyrie II, which I suggest represents the administration of God’s mercy, reminds me of the baptism figures in the chorus of BWV7, where Bach uses descending figures to represent the water being poured in baptism.

Here is a link to a page that lists the many motives in the chorus from BWV7: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Scores/BWV7-M1-Motifs.htm

There are so many “water” references here—often images of waves on the Galilean sea, but also (particularly in the continuo motive, #2), a reference to the pouring of water in baptism.

Have a listen to that movement, and listen for those “water” motives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBwl1g5Hxqk

(If you want to follow the full score in a new window, go to the following window and and click on the “Score BGA” for BWV 7.  Incidentally, this website is an incredible resource for Bach’s vocal music.)

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Scores/index.htm

With this idea of baptism in mind, let’s go back and hear that “mercy” figure again, this time seeing in it the pouring of water in baptism—the sacrament that is so associated with purification.

Audio clip of “mercy” motive

Either way, by creating contrasting themes in the Kyrie II, Bach pairs the struggle of the cross with the reward of mercy, providing a musical balm to the harsh opening motive explored in the last post.

Bach returns to a sober Affekt for the third and final movement in the Kyrie section, a second setting of the Greek text Kyrie eleison—Lord have mercy.  Although this movement feels like a bit like a fugue, it is in fact an example of the stile antico that we have been discussing, rooted in Renaissance polyphony.

I have always found this movement to have a stark, almost thorny quality, largely due the chromatic nature of the opening motive—what would be the “subject” if this were a true fugue.  On one level, this perceived “thorniness” fits the text, concerned with sin and mercy, very well.  Let’s listen to that opening motive.

Audio clip of the Kyrie II “cross” motive

In fact, the first measure of the motive contains more information than just its obvious edgy chromaticism.  If you go back to one of my earlier posts about the Kyrie I—God and Man, you can review my discussion of Bach’s use of the cross in his musico-theological language.  As I say in that post, the musical references to the cross in Bach’s music often include either the use of sharps (Kreuz, which is also the German word for cross), as well as note patterns that represent a cross.

If you look at the first measure of this motive, you’ll see that we have both.  Bach sets this movement in F# minor, which provides plenty of opportunities for added sharps, including the leading tone, E#.

Further, just as I showed in that earlier post, the first four notes are visually a cross.  The motive begins and ends with an F#, creating the horizontal cross beam; and if you stack the E# and G vertically, it creates the vertical beam of the cross.  (Or you can do it physically by making the “sign of the cross”: the G is your forehead, the E# is your heart, and the F#’s are your two shoulders.)

I’ve discussed aspects of the stile antico in the past two posts, one of which is the use of instruments doubling the voices, never being used independently.  The concept of a cappella singing—totally unaccompanied—didn’t exist in the Baroque period, where the basso continuo (organ and cello, for example) was always employed.  The use of instrumental double (sometimes called colla parte) adds to the starkness of this music.

Another aspect that I haven’t yet mentioned in is that stile antico settings, since they are based on Renaissance examples, tend to move in stepwise motion, and only use large leaps for certain effects.

There’s one more point to make about stile antico music, though it’s a visual, not aural, characteristic.  Baroque composers often mark these movements “alla breve” and use longer note values—half notes instead of quarter notes—as Renaissance composers did.  This is true of the Kyrie II, and this will be an important point to make when we discuss the Gratias agimus tibi.

Have a listen to the first section of the Kyrie II, in which each voice, from bass to soprano, presents the “cross motive” for the first time.

Audio clip, 1st “exposition” of Kyrie II

So we’ve established that this theme, which Bach weaves together throughout the movement, represents the cross.  But what is the significance of this, and why did Bach choose a cross-bound motive, and set it in the stile antico?

As we’ve discussed before, the theology of the cross is one of the most important elements of Lutheran theology, and it is almost certain that Bach is making the point that God’s mercy is available, but only when the believer applies the cross—self-denial, the “hard path” and obedience to God—to his or her life.  No wonder this music is so stark and thorny!—it’s a difficult message, but one that accords fully with Bach’s Lutheranism.

And why is it set in the stile antico?  I believe that Bach is making the point here that God’s mercy is only available within the bounds of the church.  The use of the stile antico implies a reference to the agelessness of the Christian church, so Bach is binding together the ideas of God’s mercy and God’s church through the use of Renaissance polyphony.

Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!   For the modern listener, the theology behind Bach’s music can be daunting, challenging and even off-putting.  But I just don’t think we can ignore it, thereby reducing Bach’s music to its surface emotions, however moving and powerful they might be.  We certainly don’t need to believe what Bach believed, but having some sense of what drove him to create this extraordinary music is surely important.

Martin Luther

In this movement, Bach struggles with the core message of Christianity, as amplified by Martin Luther’s own struggles with the idea of the cross and sacrifice.  By putting the cross at the center of the movement’s primary motive, Bach is saying the cross is the instrument of mercy.  By setting it in the stile antico, he’s saying that the Church is the locus of mercy.

As stark and thorny as this music is, the movement is not unremittingly dour.  In the next post, we’ll look at the countervailing musical material, and undoubtedly find a Trinity reference in there somewhere!

STILE ANTICO, Friday 3 February 2012, Church of St Paul the Apostle, 59th and Columbus

Of all the concerts in this year’s Refracted Bach festival, this one best captures the way that Bach’s prism works in two directions: not only have generations after Bach refracted his music through the prism of their own period and personal style, but Bach himself was fascinated by earlier styles, and he freely adapted earlier composers’ music for his own uses, as well as using them as a launchpad from which he would compose fresh works in the stile antico—the “ancient style.”

A perfect example of this is the untitled (Sine Nomine—“without name”) Palestrina Mass for six voices.  It might seem odd that an arch-Lutheran like Bach would turn to the quintessential Roman Catholic composer Palestrina for inspiration, but in fact, the orthodox Lutheran church continued to use Latin motets and mass settings even in Bach’s day.  The St Thomas choirboys sang regularly from the Florilegium Portense, a collection of Latin and German motets, including works by many Italian composers, including Gabrieli, Croce and Marenzio.  It appears that Bach adapted the first two movements of Palestrina’s Mass for performance at Thomaskirche sometime in the early 1740s, perhaps 1742.  As he often did with stile antico pieces, Bach added cornetto and trombones to the vocal parts, doubling the singers, as well as adding a keyboard part—most likely organ, though some scholars think he may have used harpsichord as well.  In this evening’s concert, we present the work as Bach would have first encountered it, without instrumental doubling.  Palestrina’s Mass was first published in 1590, almost exactly a century before Bach’s birth.

Though Bach had a particular reverence for the musical tradition he inherited as a member of a long line of musical Bachs, he was by no means the only eighteenth-century composer who composed in the stile antico.  We present here a short motet by Bach’s Polish contemporary, Grzegorz Gorczyzcki, to show how other Baroque composers reflected this stylistic tradition as well.  A widely-educated priest, Gorcyczki attended the University of Prague and then the University of Vienna before being ordained and returning to Poland, where he served as Kapellmeister of the Kraków Cathedral for the final thirty-six years of his life.  He wrote equally fluently in the Baroque concertato style and the stile antico of the counter-Reformation Roman church.

The premise behind the Norwegian composer Kurt Nystedt’s 1988 Immortal Bach is ingeniously simple: begin with the choir singing Bach’s hauntingly beautiful chorale, Komm, süsses Tod—“Come, Sweet death” in its standard setting.  Then, dividing the singers into five “choirs”, the first choir sings each chord for four seconds before moving to the next chord; the second choir holds each chord for six seconds, the third choir for eight seconds, and so on.  The effect is surely a “refracting” of the original chorale: the overlapping harmonies give Bach’s own sublime harmonies a completely new perspective.

Please see below for the program notes written by the composers Ingram Marshall and William Hawley.

Although Sven-David Sandström was known early in his career for his instrumental works, the past decade has seen his emergence as one of the world’s most prominent choral composers.  He is especially well-known for works inspired by Baroque composers, though set in his own musical language, such as his High Mass (modelled on the B Minor Mass) and his Messiah, which reset the text of Handel’s masterwork.  Sandström’s six motets re-setting the texts of Bach’s motets fit into this category, including this evening’s Komm Jesu, Komm.  Although the work is entirely original, there are many reminders of Bach’s original motet, such as the through-composed nature of the piece, with each textual phrase being treated separately.  Like Bach’s motet, this piece is for two choirs, which Sandström uses for many antiphonal effects, including the blurred overlapping of chords.  And like Bach’s motet, Sandström’s setting ends with a homophonic chorale.

The German Romantics had a very strong connection to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn, who is justly celebrated for his “rediscovery” of the St Matthew Passion.  But Mendelssohn’s knowledge of Bach’s choral music was far deeper than just this one work: his great-aunt, Sarah Itzig Levy, had been a keyboard pupil of W.F. Bach, and she amassed a considerable collection of J.S. Bach’s scores, which she later donated to the Berlin Singakademie.  Christoph Wolff posits that this fact, so germane to the reception history of Bach’s music in the nineteenth-century, was suppressed for reasons of anti-semitism.  Bach’s double-choir motets were in the repertoire of the Singakademie from the late eighteenth century, led by their director, C.F.C. Fasch, who studied the motets carefully.  Robert Schumann was intimately involved in the production of the Bach-Gesellschaft, the project to publish all of Bach’s works, which began in 1850 and ended in 1900.  The influence of Bach’s double-choir motets is very clearly seen in both these motets by Mendelssohn and Schumann, with their antiphonal alternation of block harmonies in some sections and complex counterpoint in other sections.

Max Reger wrote a series of five chorale cantatas for choir and organ (with some solo instruments as well), based on Lutheran chorales; this one, based on the famous “passion chorale” from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, dates from 1904.   These are less well-known than Reger’s organ works, which have remained an important part of that repertoire.  Reger had a particular affinity for Bach’s music, and though he wrote in a chromatic style quite unlike Bach’s own harmonic language, his musical gestures and cogent mastery of counterpoint are very reminiscent of Bach’s writing.  Reger moved to Bach’s Leipzig in 1904, where he taught at the university until his premature death in 1916 at the age of forty-three.

© Chris Shepard, 2012

Notes from Ingram Marshall:

After the satisfying experience of working with Libby Van Cleve on Dark Waters in 1996, we both decided another collaborative venture was in store for us—Holy Ghosts.  Although I am fond of the oboe itself, my preference for the lower range and darker timbres of its tenor and alto cousins led me to turn to the oboe d’amore, an instrument frequently found in Baroque music but rare in the modern repertoire.  One of the most famous uses of the oboe d’amore in the Bach canon is found in the B Minor Mass, in the Basso aria ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum’—part of the Credo.  There two oboes d’amore interweave lines with the singer which suggest not so much a rarefied holy spirit but a dancing one; the music has grace, flow and sprightliness.  I have taken some snatches of melody from these parts and recreated my own take on the Holy Ghost. As the oboist plays the Bach fragments, digital delay processors echo them back and create spiraling rich textures which build up to create “ghosts” of the original material.

September Canons was written in 2002 for the violinist Todd Reynolds, whose mastery of electronics as enhancement of his brilliant violin playing had deeply impressed me.  That the music is a kind of memory piece for the events of September 11 is no secret, but it was not meant to be only about that; it has many layers of “meaning.”  It has connections to other musics (the Bach Chaconne for solo violin for example and Charles Ive’s From Hanover Square North) as well as my own (Gradual requiem).  But mostly it is about the canonic interplay of the violin line that the players sets into motion and then “processes”through various digital effects.

Notes from William Hawley:

I composed the Tota Pulchra es Maria for the Choir of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Chapala, Mexico, in 2006, and the piece was premiered by them in that year, conducted by Timothy G. Ruff Welch. I was very much inspired by the lyrical beauty of this medieval sacred poem, and freely set it for SSA Choir and Organ, with the idea of illuminating in music the image of the devotees of the Blessed Virgin Mary singing her praises while following in the atmosphere of her heavenly perfume.

My Two Motets were composed at the request of Gregg Smith, in 1981. The work was subsequently commissioned by the New York City Council on Cultural Affairs for the Gregg Smith Singers, and was premiered by them in 1983 in New York. Often performed and recorded, the piece is included on the 2012 Grammy Award Nominated Hyperion CD Beyond All Mortal Dreams, by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge under Stephen Layton.

The O Magnum Mysterium was commissioned by the Taft Collegium Musicum, during Christopher Shepard’s tenure as its Director, and first performed in 1994. The beautiful Latin text, with its Marian qualities and sense of wondrous joy, has served motet composers and singers through the centuries, providing at once a sonorous poem for music, and a vibrant expression of faith. I have set the responsory, traditionally sung in plainsong at Matins on Christmas Day, for five-part choir.

For the lecture, noted musicologist and Bach specialist George Stauffer will address the question, WHY BACH?– a topic that is also at the center of his upcoming book.  I have to admit that Dean Stauffer is one of my “musicology heroes”; his book Bach, Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass is a wonderful volume, full of great insights into the work.

Obviously, I didn’t write program notes for the Lecture, preferring instead to allow Dr. Stauffer to speak for himself.  So instead, I’m pasting below my letter to festival-goers that will appear in the program.  I hope it gets you in the mood for what promises to be an exciting month with the Dessoff Choirs!

Welcome to the first annual Dessoff Midwinter Festival—and thank you for being part of this special new chapter in Dessoff’s long history. This may be a new chapter, but the seeds for it were sown from the very beginning of the choir’s history, with Madame Dessoff’s restlessly inquisitive approach to all styles of music. She introduced New York audiences to new repertoire, both ancient and modern. Her ability to draw connections between disparate styles of music is at the heart of our Midwinter Festival.

Exploring a larger theme through a festival like this one also allows us to blend choral and instrumental music in a unique way, permitting the inclusion of Robin Holloway’s Gilded Goldbergs and two instrumental solos by Ingram Marshall. So often in the contemporary concert scene, choral music and instrumental music are sadly segregated. For a composer, however, this division is wholly artificial. We are especially excited to be able to break down that wall in our Refracted Bach festival this year.

George Stauffer’s question in the opening lecture—“Why Bach?”—can fairly be asked about this year’s festival theme itself: with so many idea to choose from, why do we need yet another Bach festival? I confess that part of the reason is due to my own love of Bach’s music. I spent several years in Sydney leading a complete cycle of Bach’s choral cantatas, and there was never a single rehearsal or performance where I was not astounded by his infinite creativity and craftsmanship.

But more than that, Bach is simply one of those figures, like Aristotle, Shakespeare or Einstein, who must be reckoned with. He can be embraced or rejected, but he cannot be ignored. There are many reasons for this, but for me, the quality that makes Bach so unavoidable is that, in the words of Walt Whitman, Bach “contains multitudes.” He absorbed all of the European styles au courant in his lifetime, and synthesized them into his own inimitable style. Beyond that, his deep reverence for his musical heritage (indelibly linked to his own genealogy) also led him back into the archives of western music to Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony.

Because of this multi-faceted nature of Bach’s musical personality, subsequent generations of composers have been able to take inspiration from whichever element of his style most strikes them. For Robin Holloway, it is Bach’s stylistic voraciousness; for Ingram Marshall, it is the cellular nature of Bach’s inventiveness; for Schumann, Mendelssohn and Sven-David Sandström, it is Bach’s mastery of large blocks of sound; for William Hawley, it is Bach’s love of Renaissance polyphony—a love that we see in Bach’s arrangement of a Palestrina mass, and through his own Mass in B Minor.

Please join us this month as we explore how Bach’s music, refracted through the prism of these composers, has continued to remain at the very core of western music for nearly three centuries. And discover which elements of Bach’s style most inspire you in your own love of his music.

But of course, once an artistic form exists, it exists.  On a lighter level, we see this all the time in contemporary pop culture.  For example, ‘50s rock-and-roll was rejected by the hippie and folk music culture of the ‘60s, only to re-emerge in Grease and Happy Days a decade later.

But when an earlier genre re-emerges, it comes back with its own set of associations.  In its second iteration, 1950s pop music didn’t just come back as pure rock-and-roll: it returned as an anodyne, sentimentalized reminder of a simpler time, before the tumultuous ‘60s.

The same thing is true of the return of Renaissance polyphony in the late Baroque period.  It didn’t come back in a pure form; it came back as a self-conscious reminder of the old, with all of the related associations.

In a sense, that music never really left, at least in the church—even in the Lutheran church.  In Bach’s own Thomaskirche, the choirboys sang regularly from a collection of Latin and German motets, including works by many Italian composers, including Gabrieli, Croce and Marenzio.

Dresden court and chapel

George Stauffer, who gives the opening lecture in the Dessoff Refracted Bach festival, reports that the composers in the Dresden court, for whom Bach wrote the Kyrie and Gloria, routinely wrote in this Renaissance style—now dubbed the ancient style, or stile antico—for certain parts of their Mass settings.

In his B Minor Mass, Bach writes a number of movements in the stile antico:

These movements are identifiable by a number of characteristics.  Most important is the fact that there is no separate orchestral part; instead, the instruments double the vocal parts.  Also, the kind of writing is not the typical style of Baroque counterpoint, which was typified by the fugue.  Instead, the polyphony, which is more like a series of canons based on new motives for each section of text, resembles the seamless texture of Renaissance polyphony.  Finally, the phrasing it much less periodic and “square”, giving the music a certain “timelessness” and unpredictability, especially compared to the stock chord progressions found in concerto-style Baroque techniques.

The perfect example of stile antico compositional style, though not from Bach, can be found in one of the most beloved pieces in the choral repertoire, Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus.  I remember singing this piece in high school and being surprised, many years later, to discover that Lotti was a Baroque composer, so convincing is his faux-Renaissance style!

In our journey together through the Mass, which strives to find meaning behind Bach’s choices, the real question is: what is the theological significance of his use of the stile antico in these settings?

St Peter's Basilica dome

We will look at the specific cases as they arise, but in general, I believe that Bach the Lutheran uses this style to refer to the capital-C “Catholic” church in a more global sense of the Christian church.  Mind you, this doesn’t mean that he’s extending an olive branch; the Lutherans of that period were strongly anti-Rome (or at the very least, anti-papist), all the more so since the various religious wars of the 17^thcentury were very much in people’s memories.

But from a musical standpoint, in the same way that the compilers of the Christian bible subsumed the Hebrew “Old Testament” as if to claim it as their own possession, Bach seems to be claiming the musical tradition of the Roman church as the inheritence of the Lutheran church.  Gregorian chants, Renaissance polyphony and even the very liturgy of the Mass—the appropriation of these ancient traditions by Bach seems to rewrite history in a way, with the Protestant church emerging as the true successor to St. Peter.

Luther's inheritance?

In this way, the stile antico represents the continuity of tradition, as well as representing the church itself.  As we look as the four different stile antico movements, we’ll search for the possible theological meanings behind Bach’s very deliberate choice of an outdated technique, rendered new again through the genius of his craftsmanship.

Believe it or not, there are not all that many completely new ideas left to be presented in this journey through the movements of the B Minor Mass—we’ve already discussed fugues, concertos, ritornellos, Choreinbau and the invertible counterpoint of duets, which actually covers a great deal of ground in Bach’s writing.

In the last of the three sections of the Kyrie—what we might call the Kyrie II, since it repeats the text of the Kyrie I—we encounter one of the few exceptions to those usual Baroque forms, however.  Before launching into a look at the specifics of that movement, we need to have a quick look at its particular compositional style: the stile antico.  And in order to understand the stile antico, we must go back to the dawn of the Baroque period, at the beginning of the 17^th century in Florence.

The primary compositional style for church music in the Renaissance was polyphony. In that style, parts would weave around each other according to a set of very sophisticated rules, sharing some motivic material, and even coming together for moments of hymn-like homophony, but in the main, acting more like a series of complex canons.

For example, listen to a bit of this section of the “Kyrie eleison” from Palestrina’s unnamed Mass for six voices.  You’ll hear a four-note rising scale motive recurring throughout, on the word “eleison”.

Audio clip of Palestrina Kyrie eleison

As beautiful as this music decidedly was, one of the real disadvantages of choral polyphony is the obscuring of the text, which is very difficult to hear when all the parts are singing different words at different times.  But in the early 17th century, a group of Italian composers —Peri, Caccini and above all, Monteverdi, were determined to devise a kind of music in which the text would be clear and the emotional content readily communicated.

In their artistic revolution, they advocated a clear melody which was deeply connected to the text, accompanied by simple chords, resulting in the innovation of monody, which led ultimately to the development of the recitative and aria.  In fact, the very first operas, such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, spring from this new movement.

Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld

Though Bach’s music seems very complex, even he was actually still very much a part of this Baroque tradition. His choral movements may be contrapuntal, but his recitatives are highly emotive, and his arias are generally devoted to communicating a single emotion, a reflection of the Baroque Doctrine of Affects, which essentially posited that the communication of emotion was the single most important role of music.

This very famous aria by Claudio Monteverdi, who was a master of both styles, is a wonderful example of the emerging secunda prattica (the “second practice”, in contrast to the prima prattica of Renaissance polyphony), with its high emotional content and textual clarity.

Audio clip: Lasciatemi morire, Monteverdi

I do realize that this is all a terribly simplistic version of music history, but the potted version serves to remind us of one of the central tensions throughout all western music history: achieving a balance between the beautiful complexity of counterpoint and the beautiful simplicity of monody.

In the next post, we’ll examine how this contrast between the prima prattica of Palestrina and secunda prattica of the Florentine Camerata played itself out in the High Baroque of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Detail from Dürer, Adoration of the Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit

In the last post, I talked about the vocal duet in the Christe eleison representing the “consubstantial” (that is, shared substance) between the Father and the Son.  Based on my premise that Bach’s B Minor Mass is all about the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this supports the idea that the Christe eleison deals with the nature of Christ.

In this post, I want to explore the instrumental ritornello a little bit, because I think that the very nature of the texture of this movement supports my theory about the Trinity, and the musical material of the violin part adds further hints as well.

First, the texture:

As we saw, the vocal part is a duet between two sopranos.  Note—Bach does not say soprano and alto, even though the Soprano II part is quite low.  It is essential that they be equal voice parts, because Bach is reinforcing the equality of the Father and the Son.

Leaving aside the ubiquitous basso continuo part—required for all Baroque music—the other textural element in this movement is all the violins playing in unison, a part that is largely sixteenth notes.

Using unison violins for an aria is not as rare as one might imagine in Bach’s arias, though it is true that Handel uses that texture much more than Bach, who tends to use either a full string complement, or a single violin solo.  But since I believe that Bach never does anything in his sacred music without some theological reason, I think we can assume that there is significance to this rather sparse texture.  Personally, I think it’s meant to represent a “third voice”—in this case, symbolizing the third “person” of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

As we will see throughout Bach’s B Minor Mass, Bach depicts the Holy Spirit in a number of different ways—just as the Holy Spirit is depicted in several ways in theological terms.  At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is seen as tongues of fire; other times, the spirit is wind, other times as water being poured out, such as in baptism.

If you go to Bach’s famous Pentecost cantata, O Ewiges Feuer, BWV 34, you can see how Bach uses running 16th-notes to depict the Holy Spirit as the fire that descends on the day of Pentecost.  Here is a performance by Helmuth Rilling, as well as a link to the full score.

Full Score, BWV34 (1st movement begins on third page)

Using this as a model, I believe that the running 16^th-notes in the unison violins in the ritornello of the Christe eleison represents the Holy Spirit, completing the Trinity.

Here is the opening ritornello of the Christe eleison, with the 16^th-note material, I believe, representing the Holy Spirit.

Christe eleison, opening ritornello

Audio clip: Christe eleison, ritornello

This is an important idea: in Lutheran theology, since the Trinity is indivisible, the “persons” of the Trinity never operate without all aspects being present in some sense.

The Nicene Creed speaks of the Holy Spirit “proceeding from the Father and the Son”.  Musically, this seems to be true in this duet, since once all elements are intertwined, the violin part seems to emerge from the more rhythmically and texturally “solid” soprano parts.  Even the opening “motto” of the violin part, with its expectant eighth-rest followed by three eighth-notes, in a sense “proceeds” from the missing downbeat.

In this short excerpt, performed as always by Masaaki Suzuki and the Japan Collegium Musicum (with their kind permission), you can hear the Spirit weaving around the Father and Son, with the ritornello “proceeding” from the Father and the Son at the end of the vocal section.

Spirit "proceeding from" Father and Son

Audio clip: Spirit “proceeding from” Father and Son

Two final thoughts about the “Christ” nature of this movement.  As I wrote in an earlier blog post about the Kyrie I, on the one occasion when the fugue subject was presented in D major instead of the tonic B minor, the key of D major was associated with the kingship of Christ, because D was the key of the Baroque trumpet.  (Trumpets are associated with kings because their heralds announce their arrival with trumpets.)

And finally, perhaps the most tenuous of my links to the second “person” of the Trinity, and yet still intriguing.  Many musicologists have used this duet as an example of the style galant, the pre-classical style—more melodic and with simpler harmonies—that characterized the generation of Bach’s sons.  Bach had come under strong criticism in music periodicals about how he was so old-fashioned, and many scholars believe that he turned to the fashionable style galant (particularly in his later years) to prove his ability to write in any style.

If that is true, then perhaps Bach chose the “new” style to symbolize the New Testament aspect of Christ’s identity, in contrast to the rather imposing sense and architecture of the Kyrie I, representing God the Father—the God of the Old Testament.

I admit that’s a bit of a reach, but you never know what Bach was thinking!