Ave Maria by Josquin Desprez
For our first installment, what could be more appropriate than the mother-ship of all motets, Josquin's utterly perfect 'Ave Maria...virgo serena'. Bob got to know this piece in an early music history and analysis course at SSU. (Thanks, Arthur Hills!) A bunch of us fell in love with it and worked it up for a little class performance. After graduation, when I was doing my first (so-called) conducting with a small singing group called Mantichorus [Manticore (n.): Mythical creature with the body of a lion, head of a man and a scorpion's tail; said to charm its pre by singing in a melodious voice], I dug up the Josquin
(in C clefs except for the bass), and we made it a core piece in our repertoire.
It's so pure in structure and in melodic form! It incorporates crystalline imitative passages, Josquin's trademark paired duets, dramatic build-ups, a triple-time section in which the tenor sings the soprano line a beat later, and finally a stunning homophonic conclusion.
For our first installment, what could be more appropriate than the mother-ship of all motets, Josquin's utterly perfect 'Ave Maria...virgo serena'. Bob got to know this piece in an early music history and analysis course at SSU. (Thanks, Arthur Hills!) A bunch of us fell in love with it and worked it up for a little class performance. After graduation, when I was doing my first (so-called) conducting with a small singing group called Mantichorus [Manticore (n.): Mythical creature with the body of a lion, head of a man and a scorpion's tail; said to charm its pre by singing in a melodious voice], I dug up the Josquin
(in C clefs except for the bass), and we made it a core piece in our repertoire.
It's so pure in structure and in melodic form! It incorporates crystalline imitative passages, Josquin's trademark paired duets, dramatic build-ups, a triple-time section in which the tenor sings the soprano line a beat later, and finally a stunning homophonic conclusion.