HOLIDAY BRASS & CHORAL CONCERTS
PROGRAM NOTES
Music has been intertwined with the Christmas narrative for centuries. In the medieval era, elements of the story came to life through poignantly simple plainchant and spirited carols. Renaissance composers used music in a more patently dramatic way, drawing on additional textures and timbres to tell the tale. And in the baroque, composers took these techniques to even greater extremes. The music included in this program touches all of these points in history, highlighting what is unique about each era while underscoring the common narrative that unites them. The intensely personal emotions of the Virgin Mary, the archetypal story of the Magi guided by a star, the wondrous contradiction implicit in the Son of God lying in a manger—each work lends a distinct voice to 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—most commonly in services like the Mass and Divine Offices. Some chants are used only at specific times of the year; the hymn Veni veni Emmanuel, for example, was sung exclusively during Vespers the week before Christmas. With its more general sentiment of praise, however, the early Christian hymn Te Deum laudamus was appropriate to many important days in the liturgical calendar, and is still frequently used in worship today.
As chant continued to figure prominently in devotional life, music with multiple parts gradually ascended in importance. Renaissance composers’ musical choices—particularly for sacred occasions—were guided more by compositional rules than by creative impulse. The works of Thomas Tallis, who was deeply mired in the religious turmoil of sixteenth-century England, illustrate how music’s role and style shifted as ideas about personal belief changed. The imitative, seamless writing of Tallis’s Videte miraculum typifies the rich, decorative polyphony associated with the Catholic tradition, while the straightforward character of his O nata lux evokes the philosophical shift that took place during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Other Christmas tunes have more secular roots. Originally a dance, the carol retained its rhythmic energy as the term itself came to define a song consisting of a burden (or refrain) alternating with a series of verses. Personent hodie and the medieval villancico Riu, riu, chiu illustrate this spirited character well. Like many carols, the Boar’s Head Carol—which describes the Anglo-Saxon tradition of slaughtering a boar and presenting its head at a Christmas feast—is macaronic or set in two languages; while most of the verses (with the exception of the last line) are in English, the refrain is in Latin. In dulci jubilo, known most popularly today as “Good Christian Men, Rejoice” and here set by seventeenth-century composer Michael Praetorius, is another example of a macaronic carol. There is no rose represents a type of polyphonic music cultivated in the thirteenth century, perhaps to be sung at informal devotional services. Dating from the sixteenth century, Coventry Carol comes from a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. The haunting melody dramatizes a mother’s lament for her son, whom Herod has condemned to death in the Massacre of the Innocents.
At the heart of this program are four settings of the Christmas Matins text, “O magnum mysterium,” which depicts the miracle of Christ’s birth in sharp contrasts: Christ’s lowly, humble surroundings and the miracle that has taken place, and the divine contradiction of a virgin bearing a child. Sixteenth-century composer Tomás Luis de Victoria’s setting truncates the text, focusing solely on the sweetly pastoral image of Christ in the manger. The work begins with gentle unison voices, gradually painting the scene in delicate brushstrokes of preternaturally calm polyphony. In contrast, Victoria’s contemporary Jacob Handl employs double choirs in vigorous antiphony, striking a tone that is ultimately more celebratory than reverent.
Around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in Venice, composers increasingly used contrasting timbres and textures rather than the more homogeneous a cappella sound. (Seventeenth-century German composers Heinrich Schütz and Dieterich Buxtehude rely on these contrasts, also known as concertato style, as well.) The difference is illustrated marvelously in Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli’s O magnum mysterium, in which he mixes split choir and instrumental textures to great dramatic effect. And although Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ setting—composed in 1960 as part of a longer cycle—is the most recent of the four settings, it in many ways evokes the earliest, bringing out the sense of mystery and wonder that pervades Victoria’s setting with sweetly pungent dissonances.
Although composers didn’t begin writing music specifically intended for instruments alone until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, brass instruments add panache to holiday storytelling. Associated with wealth and grandeur, brass instruments were frequently used both in church and at court for musical “decoration.” In Germany, the trumpet had such an exalted status that players were required to become members of an exclusive guild in order to play the instrument, 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. Brass instruments were also used for more earthly pursuits such as dancing. One of sixteenth-century composer Michael Praetorius’s most famous and extensive works is Terpsichore, a collection of over 300 dances published in 1612. Based on popular tunes and evoking a constellation of moods, the pieces could be adapted for a variety of occasions.
