Composing Brumel
Ivan Moody
This is a slightly amended version of an
essay which originally appeared in the booklet accompanying "Hilliard Live
3" (Hilliard Ensemble/BBC, 1997)
For a composer, the
experience of editing music by another composer is always an exciting one. In a
sense, it is "virtual composing": one sees the music appear under
one's fingertips with something of the same breathlessness which accompanies
the gradual materialization of one's own work, but there is an added element of
unpredictability, and, with a composer as imaginative as Brumel, of excitement.
Brumel's music has an
almost architectural sense of space: as one sees during the course of
transcription the cascades of melody materializing around the scaffolding of
the long notes of the cantus firmus, one has the feeling that he is
moulding musical material in what one might describe as a plastic way. He is
also a composer of astonishing range, as one might expect of the man who wrote
the twelve-part Missa Et ecce terrae motus: at the opposite end of the
scale are his tiny three-part motets, which show just as much invention and,
since he is not able to count upon the sheer vocal extravagance of twelve
independent parts, arguably more.
It is clear that Brumel was
much admired in his own time:
"Agricolla, Verbonnet, Prioris,
Josquin Desprez, Gaspar, Brunel, Compère
Ne parlez plus de joyeux chantz ne ris,
Mais composez ung Ne recorderis,
Pour lamenter nostre maistre et bon père."
Thus Guillaume Crétin, in
his Déploration on the death of Ockeghem. Josquin, Brumel and Compère
are also called upon to lament the passing of Ockeghem in another Déploration,
by Jean Molinet (the one set to music by Josquin):
"Acoutrez vous d'habits de deuil,
Josquin, Piersson, Brumel, Compere,
Et plourez grosses larmes d'oeil"
It is no accident that
Brumel appears in both summonses, at the side of Josquin; he was in fact one of
the most talked-about composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He is
mentioned by Rabelais in the Quart livre des faicts et dicts héroiques du
bon Pantagruel (1552), by the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo in his Le
Maccheronee, by the chronicler Eloy d'Amerval, by the theorists Gaffurio
and Glareanus, and, finally, by Thomas Morley (who praised his and Josquin's
canonic skill in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke);
and on his death Brumel in his turn was commemorated by an extraordinary number
of laments. His career took him from Chartres, near which city he was born in
around 1460 (thus making him genuinely French rather than Burgundian) and in
whose cathedral he became a singer at about the age of twenty-three, to Geneva,
Laon, Paris, Chambéry, and the d'Este court at Ferrara, where he spent the
years 1506-10.
Brumel's output includes a
series of fifteen complete Masses (whose gems include a Missa pro defunctis
which boasts the first-known polyphonic setting of the sequence Dies
irae, and the aforementioned Missa Et ecce terrae motus for twelve
voices), four independent Credo settings, and a further thirty or so liturgical
works of other kinds. The secular music comprises five chansons and nine
instrumental pieces.
The Missa Victimae
paschali survives in various sources, and was printed in Petrucci's Misse
Brumel of 1503. It is built upon the first phrase of the Easter sequence Victimae
paschali laudes: one of Brumel's characteristics, and one which is typical
of that "architectural" approach, is the building up of works from
relatively short melodic fragments or tags. This technique is seen at its
height in the twelve-part Mass, in which the composer could hardly depend upon
conventional imitative counterpoint: he uses the first seven notes of the
antiphon Et ecce terrae motus, in three part canon in long notes over
which the gothic extravagances of the remaining eight parts may unfold. In the Missa
Victimae paschali the treatment is more conventional, but even so, it is
significant that he uses only this short motif as a basis for generating his
melodies: these are the bricks and mortar from which he constructs his
edifices.
In the Kyrie, for example,
three of the voices enter, from the bass upwards, with the first three notes of
the cantus firmus, G-F-G, and then spin entirely independent melodies
from this. (The insistent alternation of G and F seems to have held something
of a fascination for Brumel - the motets Nativitas unde gaudia, Mater
Patris and Ave, Ancilla Trinitatis all open in this way). When the cantus
firmus itself enters, the other voices begin new phrases built around a
minor third, an interval which has a great melodic importance throughout the
Mass. The Christe is a free melodic fantasy (the minor third very prominent)
over the cantus firmus which is transposed up a fifth. Noticeable here is the
great distance at which Brumel sometimes chooses to imitate melodies: the
entire first phrase of the uppermost voice is repeated verbatim by the bass
at the entry of the cantus firmus, and there is a further example
between the two upper voices near the end of the section. It is as though the
composer wished to establish very clearly the melody in one's mind before
working further with it, and this, together with the insistence on certain
notes or figures within a phrase, naturally emphasizes the rather obsessive
quality of much of his writing. The second Kyrie abandons the cantus firmus in
favour of freely imitative four-part writing.
The Gloria opens with
Brumel's favourite alternation of G and F chords, and is in predominantly long
values, in contrast to the much more active Kyrie. A real change occurs, as one
comes to expect in 15th century Mass settings, with the "Qui tollis"
section. The time changes to triple metre and a certain breathless wildness
characterizes the melodic writing, recalling - to this composer's ears - both
Ockeghem and Obrecht. The final section, "Cum Sancto Spiritu"
dispenses with the chant altogether.
A stately pace
characterizes the Credo (it is surprising just how leisurely Brumel allows
himself to be, with so much text to set, both in the Gloria and the Credo)
until the duets at "Et resurrexit" and "Et iterum", both
constructed from imitative fragments. From "Et in Spiritum Sanctum"
until the end a kind of disciplined chaos reigns, and we encounter in rapid
succession pure unadorned homophony, frantic melodic roulades, imitative duets
and tremendously resourceful textural variety. The only thing holding this
compendium of Brumel’s various compositional techniques together until the very
end is the cantus firmus in the first tenor part. The Sanctus appears to
offer relative calm, but its stately pace is thrown to the winds with the
utmost subtlety: "Pleni sunt caeli" is a duet between the top two
parts which becomes increasingly active and is then passed on to the second
tenor and bass, so that by the time we land on the word "gloria", the
full four-part scoring, the change of time, which produces an emphasis on the
tripleness of the word "gloria", create an effect that is positively
electrifying. The Osanna which follows crowns this with a series of astonishing
scalic passages (they are astonishing in that one wonders just how climbing the
octave and then cadencing can sound quite so exciting) exchanged between the
two upper voices - the only composer who comes near such a combination of
facile musicality with sheer bloody-mindedness is Obrecht. The Benedictus
offers some respite, but Osanna ut supra…
The triple Agnus Dei is
constructed rather like a motet. It opens with the traditional imitation at the
fifth and octave, and then the cantus firmus enters. The second section
contrasts upper and lower paired voices and finishes with a triple time section
for all four voices, and the third is an extended, elaborate imititative trio,
well displaying Brumel's contrapuntal resource, over the cantus firmus in
the bass. Brumel's motets are as little-known as his Masses. In transcribing a
selection of them for the Hilliard Ensemble, I had the sensation almost of
learning the craft of composition afresh, since each piece offered new
revelations employing a huge variety of techniques, and all within the bounds
of liturgical propriety; a lesson indeed for the contemporary composer of
sacred music.
Nativitas unde gaudia –
Nativitas tua is a
magnificent example of Brumel's large-scale motet writing. It comes from Motetti
Libro Quarto, published by Petrucci in Venice in 1505. The conventional
imitative opening leading immediately into an extended, flowing section for
three voices. When the superius finally enters, it does so with the
appropriate plainchant, in long note values as a cantus firmus, leaving
the three lower parts to weave their virtuoso counterpoint underneath it. The
same procedure is adopted in the second part, though the note values are
shorter and the superius participates in a complex four-part Amen.
With Mater Patris
something extraordinary happens. The canonic entries which open it overlap in
such a way that for seven bars of modern transcription one hears nothing but
alternating G and F chords, creating a dark, lugubrious G minor counterpoint
with only three voices which resolves into a crystalline clarity, using only a
few decorated chords. I have suggested elsewhere that this work (which was
transcribed from the Cancionero de Segovia) and others like it may have
had a stylistic influence on Iberian composers of the period - this kind of
writing is very common in Escobar, for example(1).
Ave, Virgo gloriosa (also from the Petrucci print of
1505) is one of the most magnificent of Brumel's motets. It has a breadth of
utterance and a confidence in its stylistic range which make one understand why
the composer was so revered by his contemporaries. The rich four-part passage
at the beginning is followed by a lengthy and beautiful duet between first
tenor (altus) and bass before four-part writing returns at "Finis
lethi". Brumel reacts with magnificent melodic outbursts to the clues
provided by such words as "florida" or "lucis", and ushers
in the more contemplative secunda pars with simple, rapt homophony
("O Regina pietatis") which is succeeded by a series of duets,
reverting to four voices at "clementer considera". Triple-time
homophony characterizes the final section, "Dulcis Iesu Mater bonae",
and Brumel finishes this masterpiece with the most elaborate Amen of all.
Another work which survives
in the Segovia Songbook (with three voices) as well as in a manuscript in
Annaberg (with four), is O Crux, Ave, spes unica. It begins imitatively,
and, indeed, the altus is in canon with the superius throughout,
but in character is a lush, hymn-like piece, probably, according to Edward
Lerner, part of a series of pieces for use at the Mass of the Holy Cross. The
text is an additional stanza for the famous hymn by Venantius Fortunatus Vexilla
regis. Brumel's only other hymn setting, Gloria laus, is a far more
contrapuntally elaborate work: the suavity of O Crux, Ave would seem to
be specifically connected with its liturgical function. Characteristic of
Brumel is the insistent e-f motif in the top voice at the end; less typical are
a pair of parallel fifths between the top two voices! Barton Hudson, who first
transcribed the piece, considers that it must nevertheless be by Brumel,
adducing the canon as evidence (Lerner considered that the alto voice was added
by a local German composer).
In his edition, Hudson
further remarks that "as in no other group of works, Brumel shows himself
in his motets to have been an international composer, grappling with problems
posed by a period of rapid change and by the interpenetration of two national
musical languages". Indeed, those two languages (the Italian and the
Netherlandish) would have provided any musician with a considerable repertory
of techniques, but only a composer with the extraordinary imagination of Brumel
could have made such music of them.
Note
(1) "¿Una Obra
desconocida de Escobar? Algunas observaciones sobre el motete Fatigatus
Iesus en el Manuscrito Musical No. 12 de la Biblioteca General de la
Universidad de Coimbra", Anuario Musical vol. 49, 1994
© 1997, 2002 Ivan Moody
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