Traditional Pentecost Hymns and their Musical Trajectories

[christopher3393]

Pentecost is celebrated on June 9 (western Christian liturgical calendar) and so I thought it would be interesting to trace the musical development of at least 2 well-known hymns to the Holy Spirit. The first is Veni Creator Spiritus. There are at least 2 very old hymns with this title and I'll address, the oldest from the 9th century by Rabanus Maurus, one of the first monks to provide written notation for music. There are variations on and musical settings for this hymn by composers such as Binchois, Dunstable, Palestrina,  Martin Luther, Bach, Berlioz, Bruckner, Mahler, Durufle, Hindemith, Penderecki,  Stockhausen, and Arvo Part.

 

The second main trajectory is Veni Sancte Spiritus, of uncertain origin, which started as a plainchant sequence, and was set to music in the renaissance by  Dufay, Josquin Desprez, Willaert, Palestrina, John Dunstaple, Lassus, Victoria, and Byrd, and in the 20th century, Part, Lauridsen, and others.

 

The hope is to attend to most of these and to discover others along the way.

 

To start this off here is Anonymous 4 performing Rabanus Maurus' Veni Creator Spiritus:

 

 

[sphinxsix]

You probably know these performances - it's Ensemble Organum lead by Marcel Pérès, so just to start this thread with some quality music.

 

 

 

[Hugo9000]

You're testing the limits of my CD collection and music knowledge haha!  I think this is all I have for Pentecost:

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Harry Christophers/The Sixteen

 

Two youtube selections from that CD:

Veni Creator Spiritus:

 

 

Also, the beautiful motet, Dum complerentur dies Pentecostes:

 

 

[christopher3393]

 

 

 

4 hours ago, sphinxsix said:

You probably know these performances - it's Ensemble Organum lead by Marcel Pérès, so just to start this thread with some quality music.

 

 

 

Yes, this Corsican polyphony is remarkable! Manuscript from the mid 17th century, but the sound is renaissance to my ears. One reviewer writes: "a splendid example of ornamented falsobordone" ( here ), which is a 16th century Italian and Spanish development ( see this ).

 

And while looking into this, I found a much more comprehensive list in a ChoralWiki.

[christopher3393]

sorry about all the blank space. The edit function isn't responding.

 

Hugo, thanks for mentioning the Dum complerentur...had forgotten it is Pentecost music, and reminds me to revisit this:

 

 

 

 

[sphinxsix]

@christopher3393 Unfortunately your links don't work. Could you try to post them once again?

[christopher3393]

Sorry about that.

 

"Veni Creator Spiritus which ends the disc is a splendid example of ornamented falsobordone. Strongly recommended."

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/corsican-chant-from-franciscan-manuscripts

 

"In 16th-century Italy and Spain, simple chord settings of psalms, usually in four parts, were frequently labeled falsobordone. But unlike the earlier fauxbourdon, falsobordone was based on chords in root position. Even though inversions do not necessarily alter the harmonic implications of chords, root positions do convey a greater sense of harmonic stability, since the fundamental tone, the chord root, appears in the bass, acoustically its natural habitat."

https://www.britannica.com/art/fauxbourdon

 

For a more comprehensive list of settings by composer, see Veni Creator Spiritus ChoralWiki: http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Veni_Creator_Spiritus

[christopher3393]

Here is another medieval hymn with the same title, Veni Creator Spiritus, but with different lyrics and melody, as well as 3 part harmony. It is written by anon. sometime between 1150-1250, and belongs to the Notre Dame of Paris school of early polyphony. The composer does borrow a few lines of both lyrics and melody from the Rabanus Maurus plainchant, but this is from a quite distinct musical and in this case lyrical world than the Carolingian monk from Mainz.

 

Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Dominique Vellard - Veni creator spiritus

 

 

Veni creator spiritus · Trio Mediaeval

 

 

 

and two performances by the Hilliard Ensemble:

 

 

 

Link to the booklet for  Perotin and the Ars Antiqua, which includes both Latin lyrics and a faithful English translation:

https://www.chandos.net/chanimages/Booklets/CO6046.pdf   (Perotin and Leonin are the best-known composers from the Notre Dame school)

 

 Here is a brief description of the music of the Notre Dame school:

 

"Where the earlier repertories had consisted, with only the rarest (and oft-times dubious) exceptions, of two-part settings that paired the original chant tenor with one added voice, there is a whole cycle of Notre Dame settings with two added parts for a total texture of three voices, and even a few especially grandiose items with three added parts for an unheard-of complement of four. The earlier repertories had favored two styles: a note-against-note style called discant, and a somewhat more florid style called organum, with the tenor sustained against short melismatic flights in the added voice. A typical Notre Dame composition alternated the two styles and took them both to extremes. In “organal” sections, each tenor note could literally last minutes, furnishing a series of protracted drones supporting tremendous melismatic outpourings; the discant sections, by contrast, were driven by besetting rhythms that (for the first time anywhere) were precisely fixed in the notation. The chant settings associated with Notre Dame, in short, were as ambitious as the cathedral for which they were composed. They took their stylistic bearings from existing polyphonic repertories but vastly outstripped their predecessors in every dimension—length, range, number of voices.

 

--Taruskin, Richard. Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music

[christopher3393]

Here is a little known 3 part motet by Guillaume de Machaut. He is regarded by many musicologists as the greatest and most important composer of the 14th century. One part of the motet is a Veni Creator Spiritus that is Machaut's own creation, lyrically and musically.

 

 

 

[christopher3393]

 

 

wiki: 

John Dunstable, c. 1390 – 1453) was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance periods. He was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century,  and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School.

Dunstaple's influence on the continent's musical vocabulary was enormous, particularly considering the relative paucity of his (attributable) works. He was recognized for possessing something never heard before in music of the Burgundian School: la contenance angloise("the English countenance"), a term used by the poet Martin le Franc in his Le Champion des Dames. Le Franc added that the style influenced Dufay and Binchois — high praise indeed.

Writing a few decades later in about 1476, the Flemish composer and music theorist Tinctoris reaffirmed the powerful influence Dunstaple had, stressing the "new art" that Dunstaple had inspired. Tinctoris hailed Dunstaple as the fons et origo of the style, its "wellspring and origin."

The contenance angloise, while not defined by Martin le Franc, was probably a reference to Dunstaple's stylistic trait of using full triadic harmony, along with a liking for the interval of the third. Assuming that he had been on the continent with the Duke of Bedford, Dunstaple would have been introduced to French fauxbourdon; borrowing some of the sonorities, he created elegant harmonies in his own music using thirds and sixths. Taken together, these are seen as defining characteristics of early Renaissance music, and both Le Franc's and Tinctoris's comments suggest that many of these traits may have originated in England, taking root in the Burgundian School around the middle of the century.

Of the works attributed to him only about fifty survive, among which are two complete masses, three sets of connected mass sections, fourteen individual mass sections, twelve complete isorhythmic motets (including the famous one which combines the hymn Veni creator spiritus and the sequence Veni sancte spiritus.

[christopher3393]

2 Ancient Liturgical Melodies (arr. L. Stokowski) : Veni Creator Spiritus - Veni Emmanuel. Veni Creator Spiritus ends around 2:30. You'll likely recognize Veni Emmanuel as "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel".

 

 

Influenced by Dunstable (see above) but very much its own sound, Gilles Binchois, "Veni Creator Spiritus", performed by the Twin Cities based Rose Ensemble:

 

 

 

[christopher3393]

Noted early renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay,  "Veni Creator Spiritus". This performance is ok.

 

 

The best performance is on Pomerium's recording of Guillaume Dufay, Mass for St. Anthony of Padua. Not available on Youtube or streaming services.

 

 

A contemporary arrangement of Veni Creator Spritus that sounds...contemporary:

 

 

 

[christopher3393]

Alonso Pérez de Alba (14??-1504): Veni Creator Spiritus

from Un Libro de Horas de Isabel la Católica, Odhecaton, Paolo da Col

 

 

Streaming: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/un-libro-de-horas-de-isabel-la-catolica-paolo-da-col/8007068562329

 

[christopher3393]

Veni Creator Spiritus,  Orlande de Lassus · Edward Higginbottom · The Choir of New College Oxford

 

 

For a one voice per part performance of this as well as a second version by Lassus: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/lasso-hymnus-singphoniker-die/0761203775125

[christopher3393]

Thomas Crecquillon or Créquillon (c. 1505 - 1557) pronounced "toh-MAH krehk-kee-YON"

Veni Creator Spiritus with early instrumental accompaniment:

 

 

 

[christopher3393]

Veni Creator Spiritus, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, with animated score:

 

 

Victoria: Veni creator spiritus, himno a 4 voces · Ensemble Plus Ultra · Michael Noone

 

 

 

Veni creator spiritus · Tomás Luis de Victoria The Sixteen and Harry Christophers. More reverberant  recording (venue? microphone setup? both? All 3 recordings the Sixteen made at this venue - St. Judes on the Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, England - 

sound similar. Technical flaw or a matter of taste?)

 

 

[christopher3393]

 

[Hugo9000]

On 7/19/2019 at 4:38 PM, christopher3393 said:

Veni Creator Spiritus, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, with animated score:

 

 

Victoria: Veni creator spiritus, himno a 4 voces · Ensemble Plus Ultra · Michael Noone

 

 

 

Veni creator spiritus · Tomás Luis de Victoria The Sixteen and Harry Christophers. More reverberant  recording (venue? microphone setup? both? All 3 recordings the Sixteen made at this venue - St. Judes on the Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, England - 

sound similar. Technical flaw or a matter of taste?)

 

 

I think it's largely a matter of taste with The Sixteen and the reverberant sound field.  On the one hand, it masks the number of members of the ensemble, but it makes the blend a little more homogeneous which I think a lot of people like with a choir.  Also, someone sitting in a pew will hear this more distant sound, and I think that's also part of their intent.  It's more "otherworldly" when you can't localize the source of the sound, which goes along with the spiritual intent of the genre (IMO of course haha). 

 

Or perhaps it's just how I view it, as I think they tend to match my preferences for these glorious works.  Although I have more recordings of The Tallis Scholars than The Sixteen.  Both ensembles have tended toward a similar sound, I think.  Usually, I just let the sound and the experience wash over and envelop and fill me and don't analyze closely what I'm hearing with this type of music.  I'll have to listen for those aspects the next time I get out my favorite recordings from them.  At one time, there were a lot of the same singers involved in both groups, and a few were also part of the Choir of The English Concert.  I recall noting a few of the same names recurring in my CD booklets for those groups years ago when I was first introducing myself to Renaissance polyphony (mostly Palestrina at first, having read Giuseppe Verdi's letters praising him as the father of Italian music.  Verdi and Rachmaninov were my first great loves in music.).  Early music instrumental ensembles in the UK also shared many of the same members.  I'm sure it helped them to survive in the 1980s when there wasn't as much demand or interest in "period practice" attempts and the large-scale "romanticized" interpretations were still more popular/prevalent.  Now the groups probably all have distinct membership, other than the occasional soloist.