Beauty Farm and the Gombert Motets

Program: #23-22   Air Date: May 29, 2023

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from the recording Nicolas Gombert Masses on the Fra Bernardo label featuring the ensemble Beauty Farm. It is CD FB 2231711. For more information: http://frabernardo.com/

As contemporaries, such as the enthusiastic Juan Bermudo, described, el profundo Gomberto not only explores the boundaries of counterpoint, but deliberately transcends them. For him, music has no boundaries! We are puzzled and amazed by his daring polyphony, in which false relations, augmented fifths, diminished fourths in chords, deliberately placed dissonances, imitations that uniquely compress themselves even in sometimes unusual intervals are, as it were, topoi. But it was precisely for this that Gombert was appreciated and admired far beyond his time.

How can one approach the interpretation, a reading and an analysis of a complex music that was not read in score in it's time? Printed in partbooks, written or handed down in folios in individual parts, everything must be thrown overboard when "reading", singing, listening, which at least in the past centuries has become traditional in the idea of "choral music", indeed in the reading of music in general. Flying blind, as it were - without exact knowledge of the course of the other voices - each singer once floated horizontally through the music. "beauty farm" embarks on an exploratory journey into this now alien world of Renaissance polyphony. The ensemble has recorded 19 motets by Nicolas Gombert according to new critical editions. Of course, some of them are world premiere recordings.

Radical changes can be observed again and again in the history of music: styles, genres, techniques change fundamentally or are completely displaced by something new. As much as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach says he learned from his father Johann Sebastian, his musical language hardly resembles that of the Thomaskantor. As much as Beethoven owes Mozart's sonata form and Haydn's motivic-thematic work, his tone and syntax are unmistakably new. And so on: evolution and revolution, commitment to inheritance and the departure to new shores are often closely linked, changes in mentalities and social upheavals are reflected in aesthetic generation conflicts.

The inherently diverse innovations of the great generation of composers around 1500 - associated with names such as Jakob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, Pierre de la Rue, Heinrich Isaac, Antoine Brumel, Jean Mouton - were both continued and negated by their successors. Although composers such as Adrian Willaert, Jean Richafort, Jacquet von Mantua, Cristóbal de Morales, Nicolas Gombert or the a little younger Clemens non Papa, Cipriano de Rore or Thomas Crecquillon were certainly familiar with the achievements of their predecessors and in some cases clearly in their early works tied in with this, they quickly developed a different aesthetic. Often quoted, but here too, indispensable are the sentences of a competent observer of this development, the composer and music theorist Hermann Finck. In his textbook Practica Musica, published in 1556, Finck wrote: “At that time [that is, from 1480] Josquin Desprez, who can truly be called the father of musicians, to whom much can be ascribed: He was in fact to many in subtlety and loveliness superior, but his way of composing is more naked, that is, although he is extremely astute in inventing imitations, he still uses many pauses. ... But in our time there are new inventors, among whom is Nicolas Gombert, student of Josquin blessed memory, who shows all musicians the direction, even the right way to invent imitations and subtleties, and he is the inventor of one of Music that was very different from the earlier ones. This namely avoids the pauses, and his way of composing is full of harmonies as well as imitations. "[1]

This characteristic is brief, but sharp and apt, as we shall see later. Two things seem remarkable at first: On the one hand Finck Gombert names Josquin's pupil, on the other hand he names the profound stylistic differences between the two composers in the same sentence. In this context, “pupil” (discipulus) is not meant as a metaphor for a stylistic succession, but must be understood literally, biographically: Nicolas Gombert was probably born in the small settlement of La Gorgue, where the name Gombert is still widespread today. La Gorgue (now in the French department of Nord in the Hauts-de-France region) is only about 65 kilometers as the crow flies from Condé-sur-l’Escaut, where Josquin lived from 1504 until his death in 1521. The fact that the young Gombert as a choirboy at the Collegiate Church of Condé, who was headed by Josquin as provost, learned to sing, improvise and perhaps also to compose from the older master is an attractive, if no longer documentable scenario. In any case, Finck sees both as the most important composers of their time. 

Otherwise we are not informed about Gombert's early years; the assumption of a date of birth around 1495 is based on speculation. He did not appear on the scene until 1526: as a singer in one of the most important court orchestras of the time, in the service of Emperor Charles V. Since Karl stayed in Spain throughout that year, Gombert must have been recruited by a musical agent in France or Italy his, which means that he already had a certain reputation. In fact, it seems reasonable to assume that his compositional qualities recommended him for the work in the imperial chapel, because even if he never became conductor, he soon became the unofficial court composer. 

In 1526 he could have composed the motet Veni electa mea for the wedding of Charles and Isabella of Portugal on March 10 in Seville; however, the piece has come down to us elsewhere under the name of Jacquets of Mantua. [2] In 1527 he composed Dicite in magni for the birth of Karl's son Philip (later Philip II). In 1531 he created Felix Austriae domus for the coronation of Karl's brother Ferdinand I as Roman king (Ferdinand took over the administration of the empire in Central Europe), and in 1533 Qui colis Ausoniam for an alliance between the emperor, Pope Clement VII and other Italian rulers in Bologna.

Composer Info

Nicolas Gombert

CD Info

CD FB 2231711