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Millennium of Music
April 2007 Schedule
What is Gregorian Chant?--As we have done in the past, we spend some weeks looking at a key topic in early music. This month, we continue our series on what Gregorian Chant actually is--almost everything we assume we know about it is in fact incorrect (or at least incomplete), and we will spend some weeks getting to the actual truth. This is (amazingly)only possible because of a series of studies and recordings made in the last few years.
Our guide will be long-time Millennium guest and chant expert, Fr. Jerome Weber, early music critic of Fanfare magazine.
We follow this with another series looking at a topic in early music, also introduced by Fr. Weber:
Machaut to early Josquin--The Transition from Late Medieval to the Renaissance.
#07-14: 03/26/07 --The Editors in Solesmes--So, Franks in the centuries after Charlemagne introduced new hymns, new Ordinaries, sequences, tropes, organum, and rhythm became strict rather than free, with melismas being eliminated because the slower singing made them interminable, and the musical accents were shifted to word accents. By the 1614 Medici edition these chnages were codified--How did a group of Benedictine scholar/monks beginning in the 1833 help reconstruct what the earlier chant sounded like?
#07-15: 04/02/07 -- Justus ut palma--Dom Mocquereau in Solesmes chose this one gradual to show how he researched the purest, earliest chants--he reproduced over 200 medieval sources for this chant to show they were essentially the same, proving that the earliest authentic version of the work could be recovered, rejecting the corrupted version that had been used for centuries.
#07-16: 04/09/07 -- Feast of St. John the Baptist--Once again, the remarkable Norwegian ensemble that gave us the Mass of the Holy Blood has produced this extraordinary record of a complete feast day--one of the two or three most complete such services ever recorded! (a US premiere).
#07-17: 04/16/07 --Machaut's Motets & the Blessed Henry Suso--Thanks to the work of Anne Walters Robertson, we have an amazing theory--that the motets 1-17 of Machaut form a vast cycle on the aspects of spiritual love as delineated by the popular mystic and Dominican friar, Blessed Henry Suso in his treatise "Wisdom's Watch Upon the Hours"--and with two recent recordings, we can track these astounding works.
#07-18: 04/23/07 --Ars Subtilior and Solage--The time after Machaut's death was marked by unusual complexities of rhythm, notation, and text called Ars Subtilior--a new disc by the Gothic Voices focuses on the shadowy figure of "Solage," active in French court circles in the 1380s. Not only are some of the pieces recorded of the first time, this disc adds ten works never before attributed to the oeuvre of Solage on stylistic grounds.
#07-19: 04/30/07--Dufay to Josquin--Early and mature works of Guillaume Dufay, and works that were attributed to Josquin now known to be by various contemporaries, lead us through the rich half-century from 1440 to 1490--from the last hints of medievalism to full-bore mature Renaissance polyphony; we'll conclude with Josquin pure & true.
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