Ma fin est mon commencement by Guillaume de Machaut
For some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this week's 'Monday Madrigal'. As you might recall, I've relaxed the boundary of this (eagerly awaited) post to include secular early music in general. And as, in a dreamlike state, I roved among the various periods and styles and languages and pieces with which I'm familiar (or in which I've at least dabbled), suddenly I thought of Ross Lee Finney's 'Spherical Madrigals', and in particular one of its constituent pieces, 'On a round ball', a setting of the middle verse of John Donne's powerful poem, 'A Valediction: Of Weeping'.
The spherical theme (and, no doubt, the time of night) led somewhat strangely to Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight'; and then I got to thinking about how, upon a sphere (as a convenient example at hand, let's say the globe), if one moves persistently in the same direction, one eventually reaches one's starting point. (Advanced swimming skills are useful, as well as good aerobic conditioning.) That led me to Irving Fine's lively 'O know to end as to begin',
on a poem by Ben Jonson. And that led me directly back some six centuries to Guillaume de Machaut and his chanson, 'Ma fin est mon commencement' ('My end is my beginning').
As you can see from the title, the poem is written in the first-person. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual is that our narrator is the poem itself, advising us upon how to perform the music.
'Huh?' you say (quite reasonably if not elegantly).
OK, let's start with the fact that Machaut (1300-1377) was not only one of the greatest composers of the Medieval period, but also one of its greatest poets. He wrote the poetry for many of his own secular works, clearly including this one, as you'll see. Another fact is that, in this period, musical complexity blossomed and bloomed magnificently, with composers discovering ever more means of elaborating and ramifying and interweaving.
It's odd, really. One would think that the further back you go, the simpler things would be. I suppose we unconsciously apply a sort of Darwinian logic to the development of art. This leads to dreadful errors. Take rhythm, for example: Medieval rhythm (and its notation) was vastly more complex than rhythm in the Renaissance, during which music began to emphasize other elements such as imitation, expansion of number of parts, constructing larger forms such as the mass, word-painting, etc. Rhythm became (relatively) boring.
The specific types of complexity during the 14th-century, aside from rhythm, included the use of various types of canon, and of such dodges as retrograde motion. 'Ma fin est mon commencement' deals in both of these.
Its (translated) poem reads:
My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end.And this holds truly: My end is my beginning.
My third melody three times only reverses itself, and thus ends.
My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end.
The piece is in three parts; so the clearest part of solving this obscure riddle is to perform the Tenor--the third part as it is notated in the manuscripts--by singing it straight through, then in retrograde (backwards!)--
repeating the process three times.
(It's understandable, by the way, if you're concerned about the lyrics--are they read literally backwards, letter by letter? Syllable by syllable? Or what? Actually, there are some indications intended to be helpful on this point, but they seem to me only to deepen the mystery.)
The other voices, following the other part of the rubric (and, again, some arcane indications) are to sing the first part, then exchange parts and sing each other's parts backwards.
Do you have a headache yet? But soon we'll get to the actual song--it's worth it.
The whole thing is laid out in this blog post by a fellow called Jordan Alexander Key, a blind composer currently working on a PhD in composition and musicology at the University of Florida. This guy has put a lot of thought into this piece, and it's a treat to plow through his essay (if somewhat dizzying). He has included facsimiles of the piece as it occurs in the various Machaut manuscripts, which are works of art in their own right.**
Near the end, he reduces the structure to a single statement: "Ultimately, the Triplum line is just the Cantus line sung backwards, and the Tenor line is a palindrome." (Like 'Bob'; or 'Radar'; or 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama';
or 'Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog'.)
The piece-de resistance of the essay is Key's scrolling-score performance of the "Ma fin", which uses a very nice recording. He links to it in his post; or you can just click here. A normal score is attached, but you have to know the road map for it to make sense beyond the first verse!
If you'd like to know more about Machaut, check out this extensive essay and discography. And by all means take a look at the beautiful Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, one of several 'complete works' editions which Machaut supervised. It has a bit of history which obliquely intersects with our upcoming season: It was owned for a time by Jean de Berry, the duke who commissioned the 'Très riches heures' and the 'Belles heures', which inspired our March, 2022 concert, 'Book of Hours'. Images from these wonderful illuminated manuscripts will illustrate our journey around the calendar with the great Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
I hope to see many of you tomorrow evening as we learn about and listen to and sing some of the incredible Italianate music published in the first half of the 17th-century by German composers--The Spiritual Madrigal Goes North.
It's really great stuff.
For some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this week's 'Monday Madrigal'. As you might recall, I've relaxed the boundary of this (eagerly awaited) post to include secular early music in general. And as, in a dreamlike state, I roved among the various periods and styles and languages and pieces with which I'm familiar (or in which I've at least dabbled), suddenly I thought of Ross Lee Finney's 'Spherical Madrigals', and in particular one of its constituent pieces, 'On a round ball', a setting of the middle verse of John Donne's powerful poem, 'A Valediction: Of Weeping'.
The spherical theme (and, no doubt, the time of night) led somewhat strangely to Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight'; and then I got to thinking about how, upon a sphere (as a convenient example at hand, let's say the globe), if one moves persistently in the same direction, one eventually reaches one's starting point. (Advanced swimming skills are useful, as well as good aerobic conditioning.) That led me to Irving Fine's lively 'O know to end as to begin',
on a poem by Ben Jonson. And that led me directly back some six centuries to Guillaume de Machaut and his chanson, 'Ma fin est mon commencement' ('My end is my beginning').
As you can see from the title, the poem is written in the first-person. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual is that our narrator is the poem itself, advising us upon how to perform the music.
'Huh?' you say (quite reasonably if not elegantly).
OK, let's start with the fact that Machaut (1300-1377) was not only one of the greatest composers of the Medieval period, but also one of its greatest poets. He wrote the poetry for many of his own secular works, clearly including this one, as you'll see. Another fact is that, in this period, musical complexity blossomed and bloomed magnificently, with composers discovering ever more means of elaborating and ramifying and interweaving.
It's odd, really. One would think that the further back you go, the simpler things would be. I suppose we unconsciously apply a sort of Darwinian logic to the development of art. This leads to dreadful errors. Take rhythm, for example: Medieval rhythm (and its notation) was vastly more complex than rhythm in the Renaissance, during which music began to emphasize other elements such as imitation, expansion of number of parts, constructing larger forms such as the mass, word-painting, etc. Rhythm became (relatively) boring.
The specific types of complexity during the 14th-century, aside from rhythm, included the use of various types of canon, and of such dodges as retrograde motion. 'Ma fin est mon commencement' deals in both of these.
Its (translated) poem reads:
My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end.And this holds truly: My end is my beginning.
My third melody three times only reverses itself, and thus ends.
My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end.
The piece is in three parts; so the clearest part of solving this obscure riddle is to perform the Tenor--the third part as it is notated in the manuscripts--by singing it straight through, then in retrograde (backwards!)--
repeating the process three times.
(It's understandable, by the way, if you're concerned about the lyrics--are they read literally backwards, letter by letter? Syllable by syllable? Or what? Actually, there are some indications intended to be helpful on this point, but they seem to me only to deepen the mystery.)
The other voices, following the other part of the rubric (and, again, some arcane indications) are to sing the first part, then exchange parts and sing each other's parts backwards.
Do you have a headache yet? But soon we'll get to the actual song--it's worth it.
The whole thing is laid out in this blog post by a fellow called Jordan Alexander Key, a blind composer currently working on a PhD in composition and musicology at the University of Florida. This guy has put a lot of thought into this piece, and it's a treat to plow through his essay (if somewhat dizzying). He has included facsimiles of the piece as it occurs in the various Machaut manuscripts, which are works of art in their own right.**
Near the end, he reduces the structure to a single statement: "Ultimately, the Triplum line is just the Cantus line sung backwards, and the Tenor line is a palindrome." (Like 'Bob'; or 'Radar'; or 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama';
or 'Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog'.)
The piece-de resistance of the essay is Key's scrolling-score performance of the "Ma fin", which uses a very nice recording. He links to it in his post; or you can just click here. A normal score is attached, but you have to know the road map for it to make sense beyond the first verse!
If you'd like to know more about Machaut, check out this extensive essay and discography. And by all means take a look at the beautiful Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, one of several 'complete works' editions which Machaut supervised. It has a bit of history which obliquely intersects with our upcoming season: It was owned for a time by Jean de Berry, the duke who commissioned the 'Très riches heures' and the 'Belles heures', which inspired our March, 2022 concert, 'Book of Hours'. Images from these wonderful illuminated manuscripts will illustrate our journey around the calendar with the great Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
I hope to see many of you tomorrow evening as we learn about and listen to and sing some of the incredible Italianate music published in the first half of the 17th-century by German composers--The Spiritual Madrigal Goes North.
It's really great stuff.