How perfect that I’ve discussed the idea of stile antico in the B Minor Mass just in time for our “Stile Antico” concert on Friday night! Here are the program notes so you can think a bit about the music ahead of the event. And my thanks to all of you who were able to attend George Stauffer’s wonderful lecture last night– it was a great turnout!
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.
