Miserere by Gregorio Allegri
That was my mom's standard exclamation upon being presented with an overwhelming verbal barrage of any type.
(She got a lot of these from her four sons, especially in our teenage years. We thought we were smart back then.)
It's also a reasonable and curiously apposite response to today's motet: Gregorio Allegri's 'Miserere' ('Have Mercy').
Allegri, born in 1582, became a singer and composer and eventually maestro di cappella at the mother-ship of sacred music: the Sistine Chapel. Without having any idea of what he was unleashing upon the future world of musicology, in the 1630's he followed a Vatican tradition by writing a fauxbourdon setting of Psalm 51 for the Sistine choir.
(You might recall from earlier posts that fauxbourdon is a simple homophonic setting, often of a psalm or canticle. Sometimes they are even improvised.)
Also part of the Vatican tradition heretofore noted was the structure of the setting: An alternation of chant and polyphony, verse by verse, by two choirs (one five-voice, the other four-voice),
which join together for a grand final verse.
Allegri's setting made a big splash. For one thing, it grew and changed (after he was beyond caring), accumulating ornamentation (this was a tradition too) and various performing practices and myths (supposedly anyone who purloined the music to perform elsewhere would be summarily excommunicated). Sometime in the 18th-century, its tenor 1 line (the psalm tone, actually the selfsame tonus peregrinus which featured largely in my last post) transmigrated into a soprano 2 line an octave higher.
In 1770, the 14-year-old Mozart came to Rome and heard the piece in the Sistine Chapel. Being Mozart, he wrote the piece down afterward from memory, checking a few details when he returned to hear it again several days later. The musicologist Charles Burney somehow got hold of Mozart's transcription (or a descendant therefrom) and brought it to England, where it was published multiple times, eventually being subject to a scribal error (or perhaps it was drink) which led to an upward transposition of a perfect fourth in one spot, producing what are now beloved moments of musical awe when the piece is performed in this version--as it almost always is.
A different error (more a profound and very public instance of psalmodic cluelessness) resulted in the chant verses being notated in a different psalm-tone from that in the polyphony (the tonus peregrinus, as mentioned above).
If you want to know more about all this, complete with many details and side stories and manuscript explorations, you gotta check out this link to a magnificent four-part web post by Ben Byram-Wigfield (I wish I had a hyphenated name), a British musicologist. He manages to make the story and all its ramifications both scholarly and readable (no mean feat), and also fun.
You'll meet Ben again in this great video, in which he and the crack Marian Consort share info and performances of passages from the various versions. The score for Allegri's original piece, part of which is performed in the video, is attached herewith.
Here are links to a score and a wonderful recording (by the Sixteen) of the entire piece in Ben's 'Evolution' arrangement, in which we hear the early verses as per the 18th-century version, while later verses accrue more and more ornamentations and transmogrifications until finally the soprano soars into the (mistaken but nonetheless impressive) stratosphere. It's a beautiful auditory analog to the story Ben spins.
That was my mom's standard exclamation upon being presented with an overwhelming verbal barrage of any type.
(She got a lot of these from her four sons, especially in our teenage years. We thought we were smart back then.)
It's also a reasonable and curiously apposite response to today's motet: Gregorio Allegri's 'Miserere' ('Have Mercy').
Allegri, born in 1582, became a singer and composer and eventually maestro di cappella at the mother-ship of sacred music: the Sistine Chapel. Without having any idea of what he was unleashing upon the future world of musicology, in the 1630's he followed a Vatican tradition by writing a fauxbourdon setting of Psalm 51 for the Sistine choir.
(You might recall from earlier posts that fauxbourdon is a simple homophonic setting, often of a psalm or canticle. Sometimes they are even improvised.)
Also part of the Vatican tradition heretofore noted was the structure of the setting: An alternation of chant and polyphony, verse by verse, by two choirs (one five-voice, the other four-voice),
which join together for a grand final verse.
Allegri's setting made a big splash. For one thing, it grew and changed (after he was beyond caring), accumulating ornamentation (this was a tradition too) and various performing practices and myths (supposedly anyone who purloined the music to perform elsewhere would be summarily excommunicated). Sometime in the 18th-century, its tenor 1 line (the psalm tone, actually the selfsame tonus peregrinus which featured largely in my last post) transmigrated into a soprano 2 line an octave higher.
In 1770, the 14-year-old Mozart came to Rome and heard the piece in the Sistine Chapel. Being Mozart, he wrote the piece down afterward from memory, checking a few details when he returned to hear it again several days later. The musicologist Charles Burney somehow got hold of Mozart's transcription (or a descendant therefrom) and brought it to England, where it was published multiple times, eventually being subject to a scribal error (or perhaps it was drink) which led to an upward transposition of a perfect fourth in one spot, producing what are now beloved moments of musical awe when the piece is performed in this version--as it almost always is.
A different error (more a profound and very public instance of psalmodic cluelessness) resulted in the chant verses being notated in a different psalm-tone from that in the polyphony (the tonus peregrinus, as mentioned above).
If you want to know more about all this, complete with many details and side stories and manuscript explorations, you gotta check out this link to a magnificent four-part web post by Ben Byram-Wigfield (I wish I had a hyphenated name), a British musicologist. He manages to make the story and all its ramifications both scholarly and readable (no mean feat), and also fun.
You'll meet Ben again in this great video, in which he and the crack Marian Consort share info and performances of passages from the various versions. The score for Allegri's original piece, part of which is performed in the video, is attached herewith.
Here are links to a score and a wonderful recording (by the Sixteen) of the entire piece in Ben's 'Evolution' arrangement, in which we hear the early verses as per the 18th-century version, while later verses accrue more and more ornamentations and transmogrifications until finally the soprano soars into the (mistaken but nonetheless impressive) stratosphere. It's a beautiful auditory analog to the story Ben spins.