Jesse Rodin, Part 4

Program: #22-28   Air Date: Jul 11, 2022

NOTE: All of the music on this program features the Cut Circle ensemble directed by our guest, Jesse Rodin. This is Musique en Wallonie CD MEW 1995. For complete information about this ensemble:

http://cutcircle.org

What makes a piece of music difficult? This album introduces a pair of riveting, technically ambitious, historically important, and never-before-recorded polyphonic masses of the fifteenth century, performed by an ensemble that has developed a new approach designed to honor the music’s variety and unflagging intensity.

Both works stand out for their notational complexity. They are also exceptional for the skill they demand of the performers: we find hair-raising rhythms, intricate counterpoint, and long melodic phrases. In the Missa Gross senen the acrobatic altus never rests for longer than three seconds. In both masses the tenor sings epic phrases that, for more than a minute at a time, preclude all but catch-breaths. The cover art shows how fiercely the singers must concentrate.

Rather than mitigate these challenges with a large ensemble and a generous acoustic, this recording enhances them: the performances are one-on-a-part, featuring energetic tempi, close miking, and minimal reverberation.

This approach is unforgiving—but together with bright vowels and a flexible vocal technique, it has the benefit of allowing the music to come across with uncommon directness and clarity. The acoustic used here mimics the experience of a listener in a side chapel, where polyphonic masses were often performed. Standing just a few steps away from the singers’ mouths, musical details sound crisp and present—which is important considering that the composers, themselves usually members of the ensemble, seem to have been writing for one another. What makes these pieces so compelling is how, one compositional choice at a time, pervasively harmonious sounds are molded into dynamic and varied musical shapes.

The hardest passages cannot be found at the beginnings of tracks. As with much fifteenth-century polyphony, these masses embrace an aesthetics of intensification: most sections begin relatively calmly, with a reduced number of voices and the promise of greater excitement. Only once the tenor enters quoting the song melody does the composer unleash — or begin to unleash — the music’s full power, through dense textures and potent arrivals. These pieces go farther than most, letting loose their full rhythmic fury not only in reduced texture, but also while all four voices are in play (e.g., tr. 10).

To get a sense for how thrillingly complex these pieces can sound, consider the conclusion to the Credo of the Missa Gross senen (tr. 3/8:14), which pulls out all the stops; or, deep in the Gloria of the Missa L’ardant desir, a passage in which the altus launches into virtuosic triplets against continuous motion in the other voices (tr. 7/4:48–5:16). The hardest section of all is the Confiteor of L’ardant desir, where the composer uses wildly — and, in this single case, unnecessarily — abstruse notation to produce seasick-making rhythms (tr. 8/7:26–7:48) [ill. 3]. Both masses survive without attribution. Although a couple of possible composers have been suggested for the Missa L’ardant desir, at present writing it seems likely that we are dealing with a talented musician whose name has been lost to us. The same may be true for the Missa Gross senen, though Jaap van Benthem has recently proposed the composer Johannes Tourout. The recording process revealed that both works are on par with—if markedly different from—masses by the most famous composers of the period (e.g., Guillaume Du Fay and Antoine Busnoys). Anonymity is no sign of lesser quality.

The first challenge confronting anyone seeking to perform the Missa Gross senen is that the one manuscript in which the mass survives—Trent 89, copied near Venice ca. 1468—is riddled with errors, including a section in which the scribe neglected to copy one of the voices (Jesse Rodin reconstructed the altus of the Gloria tua, tr. 4/2:55). It thus takes considerable editorial work to arrive at something singable.

Even fifteenth-century musicians reading from a clean copy would have had to contend with notational challenges. The tenor repeatedly quotes the German lied Gross senen ich in Herzen trag—and indeed the tenor’s music looks the same on every page of the mass [ill. 4]. But visual consistency does not mean that the song quotation always sounds the same. That is because the tenor must read the Gross senen melody under different mensuration signs (similar to modern time signatures) does not participate. The composer achieves the expected climax anyway, by repeating a three-note descending motive with mounting intensity (tr. 4/8:28 ff.). As is typical of this mass, moments of calm are fleeting.

The Missa L’ardant desir also survives in just one problematic source: a Sistine Chapel choirbook (Cappella Sistina 51, copied before 1488) with its share of errors and perplexing musical notation—but a clean copy from which we can be sure the papal choir performed. The mass was probably written in the North during the 1470s by someone in tune with all the latest compositional trends. And although we neither know the composer’s name nor possess a source for the love song on which the mass is based, David Fallows has used the mass tenor to reconstruct the song. It is easiest to hear the tune in the Cum sancto spiritu (tr. 7/6:45).

As with the Missa Gross senen, the tenor was conceived such that it could be notated identically on every page. But this composer’s verbal instructions are even more elaborate. In two sections (tr. 7/6:45, tr. 9/6:59) the tenor must omit all the written rests; elsewhere he reads the music as if the written notes had no stems (tr. 8/0:05, tr. 8/4:25, tr. 10/1:41). In theAgnus dei I (tr. 10) he must skip any note followed by a note higher than itself. The piece ends with the tenor being told to swap the largest note values for smallest ones, and vice versa (tr. 10/3:33)—the musical equivalent of changing “a” to “z” and “z” to “a” while reading aloud.

As if this weren’t enough, the Sistine Chapel manuscript severely impedes our ability to discern the nature of the tenor “transformations.” Here the tenor melody appears only in “resolved” versions that present not the original song, but the notes the tenor sings once the various instructions have been followed. Making matters still more complex, the choirbook lacks the instructions themselves. This is like having an answer without a question—or even any indication that there was a question in the first place. Some years ago, Rob Wegman recognized that this tenor was, in fact, an answer key of sorts, and brilliantly reverse engineered the tenor’s original notational form. What made Wegman’s reconstruction possible is that the transformations are strict: each operates on the same notation of the song melody [ill. 6]

Still another problem remains. The choirbook differs in some incidental respects from a precise realization of the tenor. Where we expect a single long note, for example, we sometimes find two short notes instead. Having reasoned our way back to the original notation, that is, we have to imagine a now lost instruction (e.g., “omit the stems”) that fits the “resolved” notation that has survived, while simultaneously allowing for the possibility of variants in the resolved version that could at first glance undermine our interpretation. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that until recently one section (the Et resurrexit) remained elusive. After extensive detective work we found the solution—as did (independently, and before us, though we weren’t aware of it until later)— Jason Stoessel.

This piece goes further than the Missa Gross senen in allowing musical complexity to infiltrate reduced-texture sections. The Christe culminates in a passage of rapid-fire sequential writing (tr. 6/2:06), the Et incarnatus est and Pleni sunt celi in dense imitation (tr. 8/3:51, tr. 9/2:59). The Benedictus is less busy, but turns out to be a strict three-voice canon (tr. 9/5:00), in the middle of which all the voices stop in their tracks (6:08). It is in keeping with the aesthetic world of this album that the Hosanna II (6:59) crashes into this gentle music, with the tenor singing L’ardant desir at full tilt.

This project emerged in connection with an international scholarly conference at the University of California, Berkeley on the concept of difficulty (May 2019). The conference addressed questions such as: How should we define difficulty, then and now? How can we clear away issues like bleed-through on manuscript pages and an unfamiliarity with an old notational system in order to channel a musician for whom “complex fifteenth-century polyphony” was just “music”? How hard did the music have to get before it posed a challenge even for an expert singer of the period? And what should we make of the widespread interest during this period in exploring the outer bounds of difficulty?

Musical difficulty can arise in disparate situations, from unexpected rhythms to abstruse verbal instructions to technical challenges that result from bad composing. What’s impossible for one person might be easy for another; what’s hard today might seem straightforward after a week’s practice. There is no question that the masses featured here are virtuosic, both conceptually and practically. Still, with sufficient immersion in the repertoire they need not be considered extreme—at least not from start to finish. Difficulty, it seems safe to conclude, is a moving target.

Missa Gross senen:

• 1. Anonymous: Missa Gross senen: I. Kyrie 05:09
• 2. Anonymous: Missa Gross senen: II. Gloria 07:04
• 3. Anonymous: Missa Gross senen: III. Credo 09:29
• 4. Anonymous: Missa Gross senen: IV. Sanctus 09:00
• 5. Anonymous: Missa Gross senen: V. Agnus Dei 04:36

Missa L'ardant desir:

• 6. Anonymous: Missa L'ardant desir: I. Kyrie 03:32
• 7. Anonymous: Missa L'ardant desir: II. Gloria 07:46
• 8. Anonymous: Missa L'ardant desir: III. Credo 08:56
• 9. Anonymous: Missa L'ardant desir: IV. Sanctus 08:17
• 10. Anonymous: Missa L'ardant desir: V. Agnus Dei 05:49