The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt! In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall. It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters. Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries. If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.
Day 4 – Hunter’s Mass by Orlando di Lasso
Okay, I’m going to be honest here. Maybe a little too honest, so apologies for any offense, because I love you all! But here goes…
I often feel like I live in a land of 2 dominant faiths. And I don’t mean that 50% of people I meet practice religion A and the other 50% practice religion B. These two faiths are often practiced simultaneously by the same people. It’s either a Midwest phenomenon or an American one, but I bet you can also find different variations of the same thing in other countries and cultures. Have you figured it out yet? The two faiths are Christianity and Football.
A little too close to home? Sorry, but I’m not going to take it back because I stand by that observation. And I know in Wisconsin, with Green Bay Packer pride, that may be especially sensitive. I want to tread gently here because I think the Packers are doing, and have always done, a benevolent thing with the whole collective ownership thing and all. It feels more like a social good than the hugely profitable franchises owned by insanely rich people and I certainly don’t begrudge Wisconsinites the community spirit that comes with that manner of doing business, even if it’s never exactly been my thing.
And it might not stand out as much if the two practices didn’t share a sabbath as often as they do. So often there is church on Sunday morning and football on Sunday afternoon. And for this reason they can easily bump up against one another, forcing difficult choices. Many are the church services I can recall in which Packers attire mixed evenly (or not) with Sunday best, often on the same worshiper, and I would speculate that given the choice between church and a football game if the times overlap, football would win more often than not.
Okay, end of commentary. You can stop squirming now. I was trying really hard to be gentle there, but I also suspect that many of you would agree with that assessment. And we’re not so special in this day and age. Cue Morpheus:
“Nothing new under the sun” as the saying goes. And human nature, being what it is, often struggles between the duty of obligation and the pleasure of indulging worldly pursuits. The modern contest between football and church attendance is merely a recent manifestation in a long history of variations on that basic theme. And a similar contest is suggested by a curious work from one of the greatest masters of Renaissance polyphony.
If you’ve studied western music history at all and I ask you to name a great composer of Renaissance my guess is that you would come up with Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina (usually called “Palestrina” for short) and you would certainly be right to do so. Palestrina is awesome; one of my favorites. While it’s not exactly the kind of music I would listen to every day (although I’m sure there are some who would), I am always a little awestruck by his success at consistently creating a sense of the utter sanctity in every single work of his I’ve ever heard (and there are lots. Lots). Palestrina’s characteristic textures are paradoxically busy with polyphony, yet serene with holiness; you could say they are a fitting musical companion to religious iconography that is both dense with colorful imagery, but somehow peacefully reverent. The towering composer of the Counter-Reformation quickly emerged as the uniform creator of the most perfect works of Renaissance polyphony, hence his continued influence on the study of harmony and counterpoint to this day.
But if you’re acquainted with a few more great Renaissance masters you might offer up names like Dufay, Obrecht, Ockeghem and Willaert, figures extracted from a long succession of Franco-Flemish musicians whose work advanced the art of polyphonic vocal music little by little over the course of 2 centuries, bridging the gap between the stark kaleidoscope of Notre Dame Organum and the crystalline perfection of Palestrina’s radiant aura. And one name that I have left out until now is that of Orlando di Lasso, a near exact contemporary of Palestrina’s. Lasso’s style is close in many ways to Palestrina’s; glorious and moving, technically exacting if not quite as flawless. His writing exudes a tender serenity that is all its own.
A key difference one senses between the two great polyphonists is varying levels of comfort in integrating secular influences into their sacred works. The impression I get is that in his music Palestrina strove to maintain the image of aesthetic and, some might say, doctrinal and moral perfection, which keeps in line with his status as musical figurehead of the Counter Reformation. The vast majority of his works are liturgical. While he did produce a significant body of Italian madrigals (secular vocal works), their style is conservative compared to the daring harmonies and text painting of his contemporary madrigal composers, and the output simply pales in comparison to the volume of his sacred music. Many of his madrigals are also sacred in nature, which is to say they were composed on religious and devotional themes but not suitable for performance during a liturgy; still, a secular output heavily colored by religious devotion.
Lasso, on the other hand, was much more comfortable with and practiced in all secular genres of the day. A quick glance through his catalog reveals a healthy sampling of all the prominent secular vocal forms in their native languages: the Italian madrigal, the French chanson, the German lied. Lasso was quite cosmopolitan and at home in all three languages. These secular forms occupy a much greater proportion of Lasso’s body of work than of Palestrina’s, and Lasso was also more comfortable letting those secular forms mix with and influence his sacred works. One illustration of this is Lasso’s affinity for the “parody mass”, a kind of setting of the Catholic mass which takes a secular song as the thematic foundation for some or all of the movements. The most extreme example of this in Lasso’s catalog is probably the mass based on a French chanson called “O, you fifteen year old girls” written by a composer half a generation his senior, Jacob Clemens non Papa. Palestrina, with his close ties to the papacy, would not have dreamed of applying a ribald secular text so scandalously to a liturgy. That’s probably a special case, and there are also numerous, tamer examples among Lasso’s parody masses, but it is an obvious and important difference between Palestrina and Lasso.
Lasso’s more profane sensibility also comes through in his willingness to assist his patrons in balancing their religious duties with more worldly interests into a sort of compromising, everyday kind of faith that I suspect is rather common across the millennia. An example of this can be found in a work written at the behest of the Bavarian Duke Albrecht V.
If football is a competing religion during our time, in Duke Albrecht’s it was hunting, the perennially popular aristocratic pastime and bonding activity. But Lassus crafted an ingenious solution to balance the rigors of the court’s religious devotion with their more worldly affection in the Missa Venatorum, or “Hunter’s Mass”.
It was not uncommon for complete polyphonic masses of the Renaissance to last 20 minutes, often more. Much of the art was in extending the briefer texts into long-breathed movements which formed a sublime and expansive space for religious introspection. The 6-word kyrie, for example, while easily spoken in less than 10 seconds, was commonly broadened into a 5 minute musical cathedral with soaring melismas and endlessly repeated words. Wordier movements like the gloria and credo could reach the 8 minute mark. All that time adds up. For the Hunter’s Mass Lasso dispensed with all that fancy melisma and repetition, opting instead for a largely syllabic setting that hardly repeats any text at all. None of the movements last more than three minutes, the longest being the wordy gloria, which clocks in at just over two and a half minutes. The whole Missa Venatorum takes barely 10 minutes to perform from beginning to end, which would have allowed the Duke and his court to be on their merry way and get to tracking the day’s prey. What is really extraordinary about the work, I think, is how lovely and balanced it is in spite of its directness. It may be brief, but is so well-proportioned that it never feels abrupt or lacking. Lasso clothed the single statements of text in some fine garments, on par with the best in Renaissance polyphony. Indeed a craftsman of his caliber would settle for nothing less.
So, should modern church composers write more Missa Pedifollium? 😉
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