The accompanying musical work - Missa L'Homme armé secundi toni (see #14 on the compositions page) - is a newly composed piece that attempts to reflect some of the symbolism associated with the authentic L'Homme armé mass tradition of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. In this work, I attempted to incorporate many of the topics that we discussed in class, while bringing a modernist sensibility to what should rightly be a piece of Renaissance music. Besides the L'Homme armé tune itself, this mass is also based on a short motet I composed last fall (Super flumina Babylonis - see #10 on the compositions page). This is a six-voice setting of part of Psalm 137 in the Dorian mode, and is modeled after the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1546-1611), specifically the funeral motet from his Requiem Mass entitled Versa est in luctum. The text of this motet is in three lines, and breaks the motet into three formal sections.
| Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus dum recordaremur tui, Sion. | By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept for the rememberance of you, Zion. |
A very clever bit of text painting (if I do say so, myself) further delineates the formal structure of the motet. The work begins with complex double imitation in six voices. A structural cadence in C Ionian coincides with the word "Babylonis", and the B section ensues, continuing primarily in the same C Ionian. At the first occurrence of the text "dum recordaremur tui, Sion" ("for the rememberance of you, O Zion"), the point of imitation that began the work returns. This works on several levels. Fundamentally, it serves merely to delineate a ternary formal structure, but deeper than that, it is a play on words. The rememberance in the text sets off the rememberance in the music. In the mass, these elements of formal structure and text painting show themselves in subtle ways. This will be explained in more detail in the discussions of the relevant mass movements.
Overall, the structure of this mass is based around the L'Homme armé tune, which is used as a cantus firmus. Where the tune appears as such, it appears primarily in the bass voice. Only rarely in the Christe and Agnus II does it appear by itself in another voice, but there are several sections in which the tune appears in more than one voice at the same time. The motet Super flumina Babylonis also underlies the structure of the mass, and exactly where and how it appears has important symbolic connotations, both from a Renaissance perspective and a modern one. The opening of the motet also serves as a motto to open some of the movements.
They symbolism of the L'Homme armé tune and the psalm motet operate at a more local level, however. Informing the fundamental, basic structure of the mass is a different idea. The movements of a typical Renaissance mass are usually all in the same mode, but here that is not the case. In the mass at hand, the long-range structure places the mass in D Dorian (hence the designation secundi toni in the title of the work), but the interior movements deviate from that modality. The Gloria and Sanctus are both in E Phrygian, and the Credo is in C Ionian. Thus the harmonic structure forms the series D-E-C-E-D. This shape is identical to one that Bach used frequently (one famous instance is his cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden, an Easter cantata originally composed in 1707) to represent the shape of the cross, and is known as the Kreutzmotiv. It is, furthermore, a symmetrical structure, which has numerous symbolic connotations. Symmetry is one of the pervasive themes in human culture, and its large-scale symbolism is simply too large a topic to go into much depth here, but its importance to the Renaissance conception of Christ cannot be ignored. His cyclical journey is here represented by the structural progression of modality around a point of origin. The pitch center D is flanked by C and E much like the realm of Christ's relevance, the corporeal world, is flanked above and below by Heaven and Hell.
The mass uses five voices the standard SATB plus a quintus (second tenor) but there are several sections of reduced texture. It is largely non-imitative, and in the larger movements (Gloria and Credo) there is some significant telescoping of text, which serves to keep the work a manageable size (making it a missa brevis in all but name). The one moment of true strict imitation occurs in the Gloria at the text "Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris".
Throughout the composition of this work, I have attempted to think as a reasonably well-educated sixteenth-century Roman Catholic would have. Since I am, demonstrably, not a sixteenth-century Roman Catholic, but am rather a non-religious Jew of the early twenty-first century, it is only natural that my own ideas and interpretations of Renaissance Catholic theology should creep in. It is not, however, in my nature as a composer to reveal the personal symbolisms contained in my music, so I shall confine the discussions below to the admittedly more contrived Catholic symbolism in this mass.
Symbolically, the disposition of the cantus firmus (bass) voice in Kyrie I is significant. The two models for this mass, the L'Homme armé tune and the motet Super flumina Babylonis, were composed in different meters. The former is in triple meter, while the latter is in duple. This rhythmic conflict is presented in the first section in a straightforward and unresolved way. The secular tune is not altered in any way to conform to the meter of the motet, and the resultant 2:3 prolation ratio creates some complex rhythmic interactions. This layering is Trinitarian in inspiration. The largest metrical structure (which accounts for three measures of duple or two of triple) represents the entire divine complex: God, in the simplest sense. The two equivalent measures of triple meter represent, in Catholic symbology, the Father and the Son, from which proceeds the Holy Ghost. These three make up the Holy Trinity, symbolized by the three measures of duple meter enclosed in each large divine metric structure. Thus, the Holy Trinity proceeds directly from the (for lack of a better term) Holy Duality, which in turn proceeds directly from Holy Unity.
The falling fifth motive of the L'Homme armé tune becomes the vehicle for another common symbol contained in the music of the Renaissance. Beginning at the text "Laudamus te", the falling fifth motive moves upward by step with each subsequent encomium, constructing a scala celestis. This ladder to heaven was seen in a dream Jacob had when he lay down to sleep at Bethel. Upon it, he saw angels ascending and descending, "and behold, the Lord stood above it and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac'." These approbations to God - "we praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you" - are clearly meant to reach His ears, and there is no better way to get to Him than by a way that has existed in some form or another since ancient times. This pattern of ascent then repeats itself at the end of what amounts to a Prima Pars of the Gloria. This time, it coincides with the text "rex caelestis, Deus omnipotens". Here, the symbolic connection to Jacob's ladder is even more obvious, with the explicit mention of Heaven and its King.
A second highly significant symbolic moment, and one whose analogue will become even more significant in the Credo, occurs at the Qui tollis. The L'Homme armé tune drops out, and the preexistent musical material is quoted from the B section of the motet Super flumina Babylonis. This section of the motet sets the second line of text, "illic sedimus et flevimus". Psalm 137 is an Exilic psalm. It was composed sometime shortly after the ancient Hebrews returned to the Holy Land from their Babylonian captivity, and it refers to the homesickness they felt during the Exile. That famous diaspora was, in the eyes of those who lived it, a punishment for sins that they had committed, but at this place in the mass those sins are being taken away ("qui tollis peccata mundi", "[he] who takes away the sins of the world"). The transformation of ancient grief and sin into righteousness and thanksgiving is one of the fundamental ideals of Christianity in all its myriad forms.
The heart of the movement, however, is the Et incarnates est. Like the Qui tollis of the Gloria movement, the quoted material comes from the B section of Super flumina Babylonis. Again, the weeping referred to in the psalm text is transformed into something more positive. Since the mass text overlay is referring to the physical incarnation of Christ, tears of hopelessness can be reinterpreted as tears of awe.
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In composing this work, I have gained a much healthier appreciation for the compositional skill involved in working with a priori materials in a musical style as restrictive as that of the Renaissance. The L'Homme armé tune is not an easy one to work with, due to its awkward rhythms and intervallic structure. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I was attempting to incorporate it into yet another previously composed work with which it was largely incompatible. I managed to run this work off rather quickly, but I cannot imagine composing a quality L'Homme armé mass in six days as an audition piece. Thankfully, jobs that require that sort of test are few and far between in today's world.
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