Noe, noe psallite by Jean Mouton
In the late teens of the 16th-century, Ottaviano Petrucci, one of the earliest music printers, and the first to make music publishing a viable business, brought forth his final four music volumes: The 'Motetti de la Corona' (Motets of the Crown). These include a total of 83 motets.
The title page of each partbook includes the title of the series, the volume number, and a sharply depicted image of a crown, lit from the front-right. You can see for yourself on the attached scan from the soprano partbook for the second volume, which includes title page, table of contents, and the soprano part for today's motet:
Noe, noe psallite, by Jean Mouton.
We don't know why Petrucci gave this compendium of motets the appellation 'Corona'. (It seems, however, to have had nothing to do with a plague.) There is no evidence that the title referred to a dedication to a royal personage, nor that there was a license from such a personage to print the music. Perhaps the title is a tribute to the composers represented, a who's who of the most prominent musicians (including Josquin, Févin, Mouton and many others) writing music at the time. Or perhaps it is a reference to the fact that this was Petrucci's swansong in the music publishing trade, the crown of his career. (He lost his license to print music, and apparently managed a paper mill in the 1520's; in the last years of his life,
he printed tomes of Latin and Greek in Venice.)
Petrucci's technique involved a triple impression of each sheet: First ext; then staff lines; then notes, rests, clefs, time signatures and accidentals. Such a system requires incredibly close alignment of the successive impressions; otherwise the notes end up misplaced and ambiguous, rendering the music unreadable. As you can confirm from the excerpt attached, Petrucci was a master of this technical challenge.
As an aside: This is an incredible period of history in which to be doing music research. Scans of the original partbooks of all four of the volumes of the 'Motetti de la Corona' are available for free download from imslp.org. Through SSU's library web site, I was able to access pdf's of several dissertations on the series. And many of the motets contained therein are available for free online in modern editions. All this while sitting in a comfortable armchair in bathrobe and slippers. A far cry from my grad school days, laboring with my head inside a microfilm reader or over a hot, slow,
miserable excuse for a copying machine.
Anyway, on to the music itself! 'Noe, noe psallite' is another Christmas motet--the last one I'll be sending out this holiday season. It shares the repeated outcries of 'Noe' ('Birth'; or 'Christmas') with the Claudin de Sermisy motet of few weeks ago, but the two texts are otherwise unrelated. Here we are dealing first with verses celebrating the birth of the savior, followed by the famous 'Lift up your heads' passage from Psalm 24, familiar to many of you from 'Messiah'.
Throughout we have these irrepressible outbreaks of 'Noe'.
Attached you'll find two very good--and very different--recordings. The vocal recording is well done but a bit slow for my taste. The instrumental recording--featuring a consort of recorders--is (in a word) sprightly, and a lot of fun.
In the late teens of the 16th-century, Ottaviano Petrucci, one of the earliest music printers, and the first to make music publishing a viable business, brought forth his final four music volumes: The 'Motetti de la Corona' (Motets of the Crown). These include a total of 83 motets.
The title page of each partbook includes the title of the series, the volume number, and a sharply depicted image of a crown, lit from the front-right. You can see for yourself on the attached scan from the soprano partbook for the second volume, which includes title page, table of contents, and the soprano part for today's motet:
Noe, noe psallite, by Jean Mouton.
We don't know why Petrucci gave this compendium of motets the appellation 'Corona'. (It seems, however, to have had nothing to do with a plague.) There is no evidence that the title referred to a dedication to a royal personage, nor that there was a license from such a personage to print the music. Perhaps the title is a tribute to the composers represented, a who's who of the most prominent musicians (including Josquin, Févin, Mouton and many others) writing music at the time. Or perhaps it is a reference to the fact that this was Petrucci's swansong in the music publishing trade, the crown of his career. (He lost his license to print music, and apparently managed a paper mill in the 1520's; in the last years of his life,
he printed tomes of Latin and Greek in Venice.)
Petrucci's technique involved a triple impression of each sheet: First ext; then staff lines; then notes, rests, clefs, time signatures and accidentals. Such a system requires incredibly close alignment of the successive impressions; otherwise the notes end up misplaced and ambiguous, rendering the music unreadable. As you can confirm from the excerpt attached, Petrucci was a master of this technical challenge.
As an aside: This is an incredible period of history in which to be doing music research. Scans of the original partbooks of all four of the volumes of the 'Motetti de la Corona' are available for free download from imslp.org. Through SSU's library web site, I was able to access pdf's of several dissertations on the series. And many of the motets contained therein are available for free online in modern editions. All this while sitting in a comfortable armchair in bathrobe and slippers. A far cry from my grad school days, laboring with my head inside a microfilm reader or over a hot, slow,
miserable excuse for a copying machine.
Anyway, on to the music itself! 'Noe, noe psallite' is another Christmas motet--the last one I'll be sending out this holiday season. It shares the repeated outcries of 'Noe' ('Birth'; or 'Christmas') with the Claudin de Sermisy motet of few weeks ago, but the two texts are otherwise unrelated. Here we are dealing first with verses celebrating the birth of the savior, followed by the famous 'Lift up your heads' passage from Psalm 24, familiar to many of you from 'Messiah'.
Throughout we have these irrepressible outbreaks of 'Noe'.
Attached you'll find two very good--and very different--recordings. The vocal recording is well done but a bit slow for my taste. The instrumental recording--featuring a consort of recorders--is (in a word) sprightly, and a lot of fun.