Has it really been five years since Cantica Symphonia’s last outing on Glossa? As well as producing two discs which survey the beauties of other important composers from the fifteenth century, Giuseppe Maletto’s steering of this Italian vocal and instrumental ensemble has been focusing much of its performing activity and research on a giant of that time: Guillaume Dufay. Three earlier discs have already focused on the remarkably-varied testament of Dufay through his motets and chansons. What gives the new disc – Dufay: The Masses for 1453 – added force is that it focuses on two of the masses which this Franco-Flemish composer (who lived for the first three quarters of the fifteenth century, and who was widely-travelled in Europe) is best-known for, but with the special and well-honed vocal and instrumental form of interpretation that Cantica Symphonia has made its own in this repertoire.
These two works – the Missa Se la face ay pale and the Missa L’Homme armé – encapsulate so much of what was important in the culture of that era: the meeting of secular events and politics with a religious belief underpinned with a philosophical understanding that reach back into the age of the Greek writers such as Plato. It is into that ambience that Cantica Symphonia has always endeavoured to intervene.
The choice of these two emblematic masses is underpinned by the fact that they were considered – and this is deftly described by Anne Walters Robertson in her absorbing booklet essay – to be reflections of two key events from the 1450s: the obtaining of the Turin Shroud by the Duke of Savoy (in whose music chapel Dufay was working) and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks; events which occurred within months of each other in 1453.
Here, Giuseppe Maletto and Cantica Symphonia’s organist, Guido Magnano, offer reflections on their joint long-standing research into the musical ideas of Guillaume Dufay, explaining in words with the same clarity the force of his music as they do with their performances on their Glossa series of recordings.
Guillaume Dufay is a composer to whom Cantica Symphonia has dedicated a lot of creative time – including making four recordings of his music for Glossa alone. What in his music makes you wish to come back, time after time, to perform his music? How does the music of Guillaume Dufay epitomize for you the fifteenth century?
Giuseppe Maletto: I first heard Dufay’s music when I was sixteen or seventeen, mostly thanks to the beautiful recordings by David Munrow. I immediately felt a great attraction for this music, and the desire of being able to perform it myself someday. Although I had no concrete possibility of doing so in that sense at the time, I strove to get the scores. Some years later I started my career as a singer, mainly focusing on Monteverdi and the Baroque era, but also on the medieval repertoire. At that time there was no Italian group specialized in the works of Dufay and of the fifteenth century. Cantica Symphonia was born precisely to fulfil that desire.
What mostly impresses me, in Dufay’s music, is the strong personality that shows through it. His music is deep and intense. One clearly feels that he is able to make all human energies and skills converge towards a single purpose. Heart and mind, body and soul move in unison, contributing to the result. This sense of unity, which is present in so many instances of medieval art, and emerges to such a high degree in Dufay’s music, is gradually lost in music as we get closer to present time. Somehow, later music adopted an individualistic viewpoint, and aimed at mirroring the inner contradictions and conflicts of human soul. In this sense, Dufay’s music manifestly belongs to an age and thinking from which we are separated by centuries.
Guillaume Dufay was often called upon to compose music for important occasions or events – such as quite plausibly was the case for both of the masses recorded on your new disc. What were the views of Dufay’s contemporaries – including the likes of the Duke of Savoy – which made Dufay such an appropriate choice for this compositional activity?
Guido Magnano: The high esteem in which Dufay was held by his contemporaries is witnessed by many documents, and especially by the number of great works commissioned from Dufay to celebrate exceptional events, which in the case of motets have been mostly identified by modern scholars.
Why was Dufay so sought-after? At that time, a great polyphonic composition was comparable to a grand altarpiece or to an imposing palace or cathedral in a particular sense: that even before their practical destination all these works had a motivation as symbols. We would be now tempted to say that such works were symbols of dominance and wealth, but the case of music provides us with a deeper insight.
According to Plato’s view – which was fully received into medieval culture – ideal musical harmony faithfully reflects the exact numerical proportions which form the “soul and intelligence” of the Universe itself. The same proportions should be at the basis of any stable social community: the word “harmony” itself originally had a political meaning, to which musical and mathematical connotations were associated only at a later time.
In this perspective, a great polyphonic work celebrating an historical event (the meeting of a pope and an emperor, a treaty, the wedding of a sovereign) could be seen as a sort of “mathematical proof” that the event itself and its protagonists fully belonged to a universal and divine design. Even more so, in that as music (according to Plato) is able to restore cosmic harmony in the individual soul, in an analogous way the event being emphasized was designed to restore harmony and peace in the troubled life of mankind. At a time when political events were, by and large, the outcome of ferocious and bloody conflicts, this was not just propaganda; it was, rather, a solemn proclamation of justification before God and man. In Dufay’s masterpieces one finds many instances (some evident and unmistakable, other more subtle and open to different readings) of this “mission” of polyphony: both text and music contributed to this aim, with a mutual dialectical and rhetorical interaction which is quite different from the “lyric” relationship which is sought in later music.
Dufay was the unrivalled master of this art, thanks to his vast and multifaceted skills. The elegant Latin verses of his motets are likely to be his own; he was a canonist as well, and the dukes of Savoy, in acknowledgment of his title of bachelor, used to address him as “our counsellor”. But he had another talent. Although his compositional techniques were remarkably subtle and ingenious, his music never sounds obscure or intricate: it is amazingly communicative even for people far from its cultural background – as we have been able to witness through our own experience as performers. This is, perhaps, the gift that mostly made Dufay so precious for his contemporaries.
How would you define varietas in fifteenth-century polyphony and how does this manifest itself in the Missa Se la face ay pale and the Missa L’Homme armé?
Guido Magnano: Johannes Tinctoris, one of the major sources on both theory and practice of music at the end of the fifteenth century, and supposedly a former pupil of Dufay, stated that “in omni contrapuncto varietas accuratissime exquirenda est” (in any kind of polyphony, variety should be pursued with the greatest diligence). In his textbook on counterpoint (1981) Diether de la Motte chose the beginning of Dufay’s Missa Se la face ay pale to illustrate the actual meaning of “varietas”: in the upper voice, Dufay employed 22 different rhythmic patterns in 25 measures (For his part in his treatise, Tinctoris enumerated the foremost examples of varietas at his time – and his list begins with Dufay’s Missa L’Homme armé.)
Heinrich Besseler, the editor of Dufay’s opera omnia (1951-1966), which has been the reference point for all modern performers for many decades, described “varietas” as the avoidance of pattern repetitions, so that a melody always brings something new, unexpected, surprising: he thus concluded “irregularity, not regularity, was sought.” However, I feel that associating “varietas” only with the search of novelty and irregularity is reductive. The ancient ideal of “harmony”, which I referred to in my previous answer, corresponds to the proportional combination of different elements, each having its own identity and role: exactly like a society which would not assume equality among individuals, yet expects everyone to contribute harmoniously to the social order.
In this scheme, mathematical proportions in both sound pitches and note durations should ensure that all individual elements fit together (neither intervals nor rhythmic figures were seen as “subdivisions” as they are in modern musical theory). Musical composition, at Dufay’s time, was exactly what the term suggests: a process of “proportionate aggregation” of unequal elements. Music was expected to share the complexity and diversity of the Universe, and highlight the underlying harmony that could not be otherwise perceived.
An impressive example can be found in the Credo of the Missa L’Homme armé, where the lines “Genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri, per quem omnia facta sunt” are sung by each part with a different measure [track 8, 3:21-3:46 on our recording]: roughly speaking, each ternary measure in the cantus is against four binary measures in the contra, one binary measure in the tenor and two binary measures in the bassus, respectively (a unique challenge for performers, indeed). That Jesus was “begotten, not made” by the Father, and that it is “through Christ” that “everything has been created”, is perhaps the hardest theological statement in the whole Mass liturgy. Should we believe that it was a generic search of “variety” that led Dufay to introduce such a complex mensural scheme exactly at that point? Dufay produced the simultaneous appearance of the proportions 1:2, 2:3 and 3:4 between voices; these proportions are indeed ubiquitous in the polyphony of the fifteenth century, but here they occur all at the same time, and generate by their combination a proportion of 8:9 between the two upper voices. It is striking to see that exactly the intertwining of the same numerical proportions had been described by Plato as the act of creation of the anima mundi, the “soul of the Universe”. I would rather suppose that Dufay devised that passage to symbolize the complexity of the Creation, than merely to display his own technical virtuosity.
How do you imagine that the better fifteenth-century chapels of polyphony would have managed their musicians? Would there have been a constant supply of potential musicians of quality, or would the chapel organizations have wished to retain in the day-to-day music-making youngsters during the time when their voices were breaking?
Giuseppe Maletto: The major music chapels at Dufay’s time would include a college where the young singers were trained. There, they would acquire the necessary theoretical background as well as the proper singing technique, together with some practice on instruments. We should not be misled by the lack of practical treatises on singing or instrument playing before the sixteenth century. A common conclusion often drawn is that they had no technical notions at all. However, this argument can be reversed: the need for writing treatises arises when proper practice is felt to be degrading, possibly because of a wider diffusion far from the leading schools; this is why I guess that writing such treatises was likely to be considered pointless at Dufay’s time.
Most chapel members were youngsters: the upper voices were sung by boys. Voice breaking used to occur about two years later than in comparison to present generations. We conjecture that at that moment a boy might keep practising music on some instrument. This often happens even now, in boys’ choirs – and consider the fact that in the fifteenth century music was an exclusive vocation: it is hard to imagine promising choirboys engaged in something other than music practice for some years, until they were reinstalled as adult singers.
Unfortunately, we will never know how polyphonic performance sounded like: most evidence (the higher reference pitch, the size and shape of contemporary instruments) lead us to believe that they favoured clear and bright tones. This is why I feel perplexed by the present widespread use of countertenors for the upper voice: this forces one to lower the pitch so that the tone colour of the lower voices becomes dark and deep.
How might this situation have affected the variety of performance possibilities available in Dufay’s day for masses such as these two? How has this affected your own decisions as to whether to perform the masses with voices alone, or with instrumental participation?
Giuseppe Maletto: First of, all we should say that Dufay’s compositions are based on the “functional” and “harmonic” structure of medieval music. In contrast, a sixteenth-century piece is typically organised so that all voices play, in turn, the same role. The systematic imitation between voices leads to equality, to a sort of “democracy” within the ensemble: any voice may be either the leading one or a subordinate one, at different moments. Dufay’s music is more complex, and somehow more functional: there is a pre-established hierarchy among voices, which mutually interact not by imitation but according to specific, not interchangeable, tasks.
Dufay fully exploits this organisation and achieves, in this way, a great degree of intensity and cohesion in his works. This essential feature, in our experience, is highlighted if we give each voice a different tone colour, appropriate to its specific role. The search for tone purity and equality is perfectly suited to the music of the sixteenth century, but in my opinion it is not equally advantageous when dealing with Dufay’s musical age.
In this, we are not striving for (presumed) authenticity, but rather for a way to help the modern listener to perceive this “stratification”, the peculiar dialectics between voices, and the full structural and conceptual complexity of the polyphonic texture, which escapes our aural perception if we level all timbres and flatten the differences between voices.
The practice of mixing voices and instruments, then, led us to feel that Dufay, while writing only three or four voices to form a polyphonic work, often seems to demand a genuine “orchestration”, rich and varied in tone colours. This seems, in our view, to comply with the idea of “varietas” of which Dufay was the acclaimed master.
In the 1980s and 1990s a sort of crusade was launched against the use of instruments in late medieval, especially sacred, music. The supporting arguments that were raised by prominent scholars are indeed respectable, even if not necessarily conclusive. Those arguments should, however, have started a fruitful dialogue between different proposals; unfortunately, instead they originated an outburst of destructive criticism which depleted the musical landscape for many years.
Still, I wonder if modern performances would not have sounded quite rough to a fifteenth-century listener. I suspect that some hearing skills may have dimmed or altered along the centuries: not to mention the different attitude and the different listening situations that we now associate with early music. Therefore, we are quite aware that our performance cannot be but a modern, limited approximation.
Dufay was foremost in using secular chansons – notably his own – to provide the basis for his mass compositions. Given your own experience in researching and performing Dufay’s secular music, what do you imagine lay behind this combination of the sacred and the secular – or was there any real structural division between the two in those days?
Guido Magnano: The separation between the sacred and the secular which is nowadays familiar to us did not exist at Dufay’s time. But we should not mistake the use of secular melodies in sacred music for a sign that they did not see a clear distinction. When we were recording the Missa L’Homme armé from the Naples Ms, attributed to Busnois, I was wondering how a tune that sounds to me like a kind of mockery could have been symbolically reinterpreted, as it undoubtedly was. I figured out an analogy with the practice, at that time, of altering family names of the nobility so to transform – with the help of an appropriate coat-of-arms and motto – the reference to an often humble origin into a much more honourable symbol. False derivations of the names of the Saints (like “Domenicus” from “Domini custos”, the “Lord’s guard”) were also popular and can be found, for instance, in the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Varagine: they were clearly aware that these were not true etymologies, yet they regarded them as relevant pieces of information, not as forgeries.
The key word, here, is “revelation”: such textual operations were intended to uncover a hidden significance, which was assumed to be mysteriously present in names and other words from their origin. Reading the articles by Anne Walters Robertson on Se la face ay pale, afterwards, was illuminating for me. The act of symbolising, at Dufay’s time, was not regarded as an invention, but as a discovery; and the difference between the sacred and the secular was not to be traced in the objects, but in one’s insight. Education and religious devotion were supposed to make one more and more able to decode the “true” significances: somehow, for the literate this was the road to Salvation.
In this perspective, it is no wonder that Dufay set about reinterpreting a secular song which he had written twenty years before, and used the tune for a Mass setting, thereby opening up the route for many generations of musicians after him. He might well have perceived this not as a commixture, but as a revelation.
This new recording makes a welcome return on Glossa for Cantica Symphonia. Since your last recording came out, what has Cantica Symphonia been doing, and what other musical activities have you been involved in recently?
Giuseppe Maletto: During these years, Cantica Symphonia has never ceased to study Dufay’s music, and this recording follows a sequence of many concert performances of these masses. Of course, each member of Cantica Symphonia is engaged, as a soloist or as a member of other ensembles, in different projects as well. As for me, in recent years I have expended much energy in starting the activity of La Compagnia del Madrigale, consecrated to the other repertoire (namely, madrigals) to which I am strongly attached.
MARK WIGGINS© 2014 Glossa Music / Note 1 Music