Music of the Baroque

The Christmas story has inspired centuries of beautiful music. In the medieval era, liturgical texts provided the basis for plainchant and traditional tunes poignant in their simplicity. During the Renaissance, composers marshaled additional musical resources in the quest for musical drama, and took these techniques to even greater extremes in the early baroque. In both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brilliant brass choirs served as musical holiday decorations. The works on this program represent these points in history. While highlighting the features that make each time period distinctive, they are united in subject. The intensely personal emotions of the Virgin Mary, the heartwarming image of a baby lying in a manger, the archetypal story of the Magi guided by a star—each narrative provides a unique perspective on the musical retelling of the Christmas story.

Plainchant, the tradition of monophonic singing that flourished in the medieval era and survives to this day, is the earliest type of music associated with Christmas. Part of the liturgy, chant varied according to the day in the church calendar. Dominus dixit ad me, the introit for the first of three Christmas Masses, was sung only on Christmas. The early Christian hymn Te Deum laudamus, on the other hand, was performed on many important days in the liturgical calendar. Many Christian denominations, including the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion, still use the Te Deum in worship today. While most chants were written by anonymous composers, Hildegard von Bingen was one of the earliest whose name we know. Born in 1098, Hildegard began having visions when she was five years old, and received permission from her abbot in 1141 to write them down. Among her creations were highly original poems that she set to music, including
Hodie aperuit.

Chant remained an integral part of the church service as polyphonic music employing multiple vocal lines gradually ascended in importance. One of the most important genres was the motet, a sacred vocal work (usually with a Latin text) that customized the generic liturgy to fit the specific day in the church calendar. Fourteenth-century composer Johannes Ciconia’s Regina gloriosa is an example of an early motet, with two relatively equal melodic lines over a lower supporting voice. Thomas Stoltzer’s O admirabile commercium and Jacob Handl’s Ecce concipies represent the four- and five-voice textures that composers came to prefer in the sixteenth century.

Other Christmas tunes have more secular roots. The carol originally came into being as a medieval round dance, and although the term came to describe a song consisting of a burden (or refrain) alternating with verses, the genre retained a rhythmic energy illustrated perfectly by Nova, nova illustrates perfectly. Like many carols, Nova, nova is macaronic (set in two languages)—while the verses are in English, the refrain is in Latin. The carol’s main idea is summarized in a palindrome: “Nova, nova, ‘Ave’ fitt ex ‘Eva’” (News, news: ‘hail’ is made from ‘Eve’). Just as “ave” is “Eva” backwards, so did the Virgin Mary reverse Eve’s original sin. With its Latin and German texts, In dulci jubilo (a tune known most popularly today as “Good Christian Men, Rejoice”) is another example of a macaronic carol. Early music expert Paul McCreesh’s arrangement is based on Michael Praetorius’s seventeenth-century setting of the famous German tune. In Britain, the Reformation led to the genre’s decline after 1550, and the few carols composers wrote differed enough from their medieval predecessors to be designated “carol-motets.” With its slightly contrapuntal refrain and artful melodic arrangement, William Byrd’s An Earthly Tree A Heavenly Fruit (from the collection Songs of Sundrie Natures, 1589) elegantly elides the two traditions.

In the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in Venice, composers began experimenting with music for cori spezzati (literally “broken choirs”), using double choirs for dramatic antiphonal effects. The most famous composer to use this technique is Giovanni Gabrieli, who mixes solo, choral, and instrumental textures to great effect in Quem vidistis pastores (1615). Written a few years later by fellow Venetian Giovanni Battista Grillo, Misericordias Domini (1618) shows the extent of Gabrieli’s influence. Composers in other countries were just as inspired by the Italian innovations. Seventeenth-century German composer Samuel Scheidt uses the polychoral style to great effect in the pairing of Puer natus est and Angelus ad pastores ait. While some scholars have proposed that Der Gott Abrahams is not by Scheidt’s more famous contemporary, Heinrich Schütz, the work nevertheless demonstrates the extent to which Schütz was influenced by Italian practice.

Brass choirs added a unique voice to celebratory music, especially at Christmas. Trumpets in particular were viewed as a symbol of importance, as evidenced by their large numbers in the courts of Renaissance aristocrats—in 1482, there were 18 trumpeters at the Sforza court. In 1548, Emperor Charles V even declared trumpeters to be under the direct jurisdiction of the sovereign. Thanks to this exalted status, brass instruments were frequently used in churches and courts as musical “decoration” on special occasions. With their alternating masses of sound, Gabrieli’s famous brass canzonas and Grillo’s Canzona quarta would have showed off cavernous church architecture to great advantage. In Germany, trumpeters were actually required to become members of an exclusive guild, and received many special privileges and higher salaries as a result. Johann Vierdanck’s Capriccio for 3 cornetti showcases the brilliance that was expected from the instrument.

Program Notes © Jennifer More Glagov 2008