Scaramella

Program: #24-34   Air Date: Aug 19, 2024

NOTE: All of the music on this program is from a recording by The Binchois Consort conducted by Andrew Kirkman. It is Hyperion CD CDA68460. For more information on this group:

www.binchoisconsort.com

It is not uncommon for Renaissance music to come down to us in an incomplete state. Most of the music on this recording is transmitted in a single fragmentary source and has had to be ‘reconstructed’—a fascinating and absorbing exercise, part musical Sudoku, part detective work and part (re)composition. The parallel with the restoration of damaged paintings is helpful. Contemplating a Renaissance Nativity, say, in which the figures closest to the Christ child have been obliterated, one can be very confident who they might be: Mary and Joseph certainly, perhaps the three Magi. Iconographic conventions dictate that Mary’s gown is blue, that Joseph is represented as an older man, that the Magi bear gifts and are sumptuously dressed, and so on. In fragmentary polyphony, the context provided by the extant material is of course the starting point, but just as important is the genre of the work. In a Mass or a motet, for example, conventions having to do with form, structure and vocal scoring help guide the restorer’s hand, while knowledge of the musical style informs decisions at the local level: guesswork certainly, but nearly always educated guesswork. When the music is by a composer of the first order, the stakes are raised, but so are the rewards. As with a restored Nativity, details will undoubtedly have been different, but—however approximate and conditional—something of the original conception may be grasped and appreciated once more.

Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella survives only in a set of partbooks of which two, containing the tenor (in the middle of the texture) and discantus (the top line), are now missing. (For more information on the Mass and the process of its restoration, please see Fabrice Fitch: ‘Restoring Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella’, in Early Music, 50 (2023). An edition of the Mass is forthcoming with the Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis.) Reconstructing the tenor is helped by the knowledge that the work is a cantus firmus Mass based on the famous Italian tune, a mock-warlike jingle that is most often sung by the tenor in long notes. It is heard very clearly in the Kyrie I and II and at the very ends of the Gloria and the Credo. But it is most audible in the middle section of the Credo and the second Agnus Dei, where it unfolds serenely in the top voice, belying its seemingly parodic origins. In fact, it appears in all sixteen sub-sections, often more than once, sometimes in more than one voice, and nearly always in a new context, so that restoring each section presents a different challenge. In the Osanna I and Agnus Dei I, where the cantus firmus is in a voice that survives, both missing voices have had to be reconstructed; in the first part of the Sanctus, a retrograde (meaning that the voice’s notated material is read first forwards and then in reverse) has been devised for the top voice, in tandem with the retrograde in the surviving bassus; and the ‘Pleni sunt caeli’ has the tune sung against itself in inversion, creating a series of static chords against which the restorer must somehow fashion a melodically satisfying top line, as Obrecht presumably did. Most difficult of all, the discantus of the Agnus Dei I consists of a series of short snippets of melodic material, each of which is repeated before moving to the next. This technical challenge, which unfolds against the cantus firmus in the altus (the voice below the discantus), is not (solely) the fruit of the restorer’s masochism: Obrecht uses the same technique in the altus of the Osanna I and the bassus of the Osanna II. Thus, the discantus of the Agnus Dei I merely extends the principle into the following section.

The variety of cantus firmus treatment means that the Missa Scaramella is equally varied from the perspective of the listener. By Obrecht’s standards it is of average length, but the relative brevity of most individual sections creates an impression of compactness. Two short, assertive Kyries frame a reflective and expressive Christe, which is gradually taken over by triple-time rhythm. The ‘Et in terra’ begins with a pair of duos that paraphrase the Scaramella tune, which is heard a bit later in the bassus and tenor but with the rhythms changed. Most of the Gloria consists of duos, which confer a lightness of touch that contrasts with the denser but shorter sub-sections of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. A highlight of the Gloria is at the middle of the ‘Qui tollis’, where the (surviving) bassus and the (hypothetical) discantus move in slow, equal values against the cantus firmus while the altus sings a more animated, agile line: a moment of stillness in an otherwise more uniformly animated work. A series of melodic sequences (including one for all four voices) then precedes a final tenor statement, which brings the movement to a close.

If the two sections of the Gloria are cut from the same cloth, the Credo’s three sections are highly contrasted: the ‘Patrem omnipotentem’ calls to mind Obrecht’s segmentation Masses, the tenor presenting the tune in alternating binary and ternary note values with dense and elaborate counterpoint in the surrounding voices. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ is the midpoint of the cycle and in a sense is its heart, setting the most fundamental Christian beliefs and presenting the tune for the first time in the top voice as a kind of epiphany. The lower voices play with recurring patterns, most audibly strings of parallel chords that punctuate the entire section. For the more straightforward but effective ‘Et unam sanctam’ the tenor once again alternates groups of binary and deliciously destabilizing ternary durations (long triplets, or hemiola). The five sections of the Sanctus are, if anything, even more contrasted, the opening section being rather solemn (reminiscent, perhaps, of the opening of the Sanctus of Obrecht’s Missa Fortuna desperata), the two Osannas swaggering and contrapuntally knotty, and the ‘Pleni’ contemplative. In the Benedictus the reconstructed top voice moves in parallel tenths with the bassus, a characteristic contrapuntal procedure which (for once) poses the restorer few difficulties. Indeed, it is something of a cliché, which cannot be said of the surprise approach to the cadence in the ‘Pleni’, which features a wonderful crunch between F natural in the bassus and F sharp in the discantus—as unexpected as it is inescapable from the restorer’s point of view.

The Agnus Dei returns us to the more straightforward cast of the Kyrie, but with greater concentration and lyricism. The Agnus Dei III has the tune in all four voices in succession, a trick otherwise unknown in the composer’s output but unmistakably Obrechtian in its wit and logic. This corresponds to the pattern of the previous sections, where the cantus firmus appears successively in each voice from bottom to top: in the bassus and tenor in two Osannas, and in the altus and discantus in the first two Agnus Dei settings. Based on the surviving voices and the tenor material that can be deduced from them, we feel that the Missa Scaramella would probably be counted among Obrecht’s finest Mass cycles, had it survived intact. It is our hope that this recording bears out that assertion, insofar as that is possible.

Obrecht’s motet Mater Patris is a world away from the bold confidence of the ‘Scaramella’ Mass. Notwithstanding its monumental proportions (it is in four sections, each of which concludes with the same musical refrain), the mood is intimate and devotional, as befits a meditation on Mary’s role as both daughter of God the Father and mother of God the Son. Obrecht’s use of five-voice texture is less flamboyant than in other motets with the same scoring (such as Laudemus nunc Dominum, Salve crux or Factor orbis). Mater Patris is one of two Obrecht motets for which the only source is Petrucci’s print Motetti a cinque (1508), which survives without the partbook for the second contratenor. In our version (different from the one recorded by The Brabant Ensemble), the missing voice was reconstructed by Philip Weller. (See The Brabant Ensemble and Stephen Rice’s recording Obrecht: Missa Grecorum & Motets on Hyperion CDA68216, which includes biographical information about the composer.) Alongside his gift for grand formal designs, Obrecht was also a master of the local earworm, little melodic or harmonic swerves that lodge stubbornly in the mind’s ear: one such example is at the cadence just before the refrain of the tertia pars, at the word ‘nece’ (track 21, 3'15): the E flat in the second-highest voice adds poignancy to the top line’s gentle rise and fall, with the resulting consecutive fifths flavouring the moment further still.

We bookend our recital with two lively four-voice settings of the Scaramella tune and three other motets with a connection to Philip Weller. The first is the joyous Philippe, qui videt me by Antoine Brumel, which survives in a fragmentary manuscript in Zwickau and which prompted Philip to devise a bumptious altus part. A very different beast is Sancte Philippe apostole, whose sinewy lines and unexpected turns are typical of Alexander Agricola (listen for the sudden rise and swift descent on the word ‘apostole’ at 0'22). As it happens, this motet survives complete in three sources, but with a different text in one. The manuscript B-Br MS 9126, held at the Royal Library in Brussels, was compiled during Agricola’s lifetime for his patron, Archduke Philip the Fair, and a bespoke text was almost certainly supplied for its inclusion there. The short Planctus David sets two phrases of text taken from the motet Considera Israel by another major contemporary of Obrecht, Pierre de La Rue. (The text’s original source is the biblical account of King David’s lament over his fallen brother-in-arms, Jonathan; La Rue probably composed his motet after Philip the Fair’s untimely death in 1506, perhaps for the Archduke’s sister Margaret.) Each phrase is sung by a pair of voices, drawing on the traditions of polytextual motets and Renaissance laments. It is dedicated to Andrew Kirkman in memory of Philip Weller.

Fabrice Fitch & Andrew Kirkman © 2024