"The Art of the Canon"

March, 1991
program
Missa Prolationum-Kyrie                     Johannes Ockeghem (c1410-97)
 
Missa Ave Sanctissima Maria-Gloria     Pierre de La Rue (c1450-1518)
 

De dinmi tu                                      Francesco Landini (1325-97)
Prenez sur moi                                               Johannes Ockeghem
En venant de Lyon                       Johannes Mouton (c1470-1522)
Complainte d'Antoine de Fevin                                          Mouton
 

Laudate Dominum                                               Pierre de La Rue
Ave Maria                                                          Johannes Mouton

**intermission**

Missa L'homme armé-Sanctus                                    Johannes Mouton
                                                          or Mathurin Forestier (fl. c.1500)

O Lux beata Trinitas                              William Byrd (1543-1623)

Deus Misereatur                                        Henry Purcell (1659-95)

Of a Rose Singe We                                  Charles Turner (b.1951)
Two bars sine nomine                             Ivan Tcherepnin (b.1943)

Missa Canonica-Agnus Dei                          Johannes Brahms (1833-97)

Notes

    Tonight's concert is organized around a music-technical device that has been in continuous use from almost the very beginnings of polyphony (part music) up until today.  Canon occurs when two or more voice parts sing the same melody at different times.  The round "Row, Row, Row your Boat"  is a simple example, and has its roots in the very earliest examples of the round, or rota, from the 13th century.  Canon in the Renaissance was actually a broader term that included any kind of composition written according to a rule.  Tinctoris described canon as a "rule showing the purpose of the composer behind a certain obscurity," a definition that hints at the playful, puzzle quality of canons.  The puzzle most often involved a compressed notation which would unfold by application of the rule to reveal the entire work.  On the cover of our program is one such example: this one line of music expands to four voices if the three following voices enter at the signs placed above the notes.  At what pitch they should enter, and how to stop the canon are questions left to the performers, for this "round" format gives no clue.
    Imitation canons were called fugae in the 15th century, which gives a hint of the relationship between canon and the later baroque fugue. Our concert is largely devoted to fugae by Franco-Flemish composers of the 15th and 16th centuries, who brought the device to high degree of development.  We begin with the Kyrie of Johannes Ockeghem's Prolation mass, which is perhaps the first piece to explore fugae at all intervals.  The mass is canonic throughout, and contains canons at the unison, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and octave, following one after another.  In addition, the title indicates that the piece is a mensuration canon.  Two of the four voices sing the same notes as the other two, but in a different time-frame;  all four voices begin at the same time, but then the faster voices surge ahead of their canonic followers.  The piece was clearly meant as a technical tour-de-force.  La Rue's canonic mass Ave sanctissima Maria is somewhat simpler in its overall design, for the imitation stays at the same upper fourth interval throughout; on the other hand, La Rue has created a six-voice texture from just three notated parts.
    The set of secular works dips back to the 14th century Italian composer Francesco Landini.  His canonic madrigal has what is possibly the earliest known canon at the interval of a 5th, a technique that was later expanded greatly by the Franco-Flemish.  Ockeghem's canonic puzzle chanson was emulated by Johannes Mouton among others in the 16th c.  In both pieces, only one line is written out, and all voices derive from the one part at various pitch levels.  The program cover round is a (slightly different) verison of the Mouton's En venant de Lyon.
    Pierre de La Rue and Johannes Mouton, like Josquin DesPrez, often relied on a canonic scaffolding to direct the harmonic unfolding of a large work such as a motet or a mass.  The motet Ave Maria is somewhat unusual in its use of this technique, because the canonic follower is imitating the leader in inversion, that is, upside down.  The result is less clearly imitative to the ear, but no less convincing in its musical unity.  Unlike Josquin, the works of Mouton and La Rue are rarely heard today.  The Mouton L'homme armé mass in particular has never been published in modern score.  It turns out to be not only another canonic tour-de-force, with fugae at many pitch levels, but is also a mellifluous and very singable piece.  We are singing the Sanctus from copies of a 16th century manuscript penned by our namesake, Petrus Alamire.
    The canonic procedures of the Franco-Flemish peaked with the Josquin generation and thereafter quickly subsided, but composers of other nationalities, emulating the Franco-Flemish example, continued the tradition.  In England, William Byrd showed a fondness for Flemish-style canonic writing early in his career.  The third part of the Trinity motet of 1575 contains a three-out-of-one canon embedded in its six parts that musically represents the Trinity, and is the source of the strange harmonic motion and flickering cross-relations.  A century later Henry Purcell continued Byrd's fondness for canons.  Purcell often included a canon or fugue at the end of his psalm settings, for the words of the doxology "Glory be to the Father…world without end. Amen"  In this context, an intensely polyphonic canon following a more homophonic texture, the canon serves well to represent the continuation of old traditions into the future, both musical and religious.
    The two canons on our program by contemporary composers are actually of the simplest variety.  They are both rounds at the unison or octave, without free voices.  The final work by Johannes Brahms is drawn from a canonic mass whose publication Brahms apparently suppressed.  It was evidently a study, perhaps in emulation of Renaissance music;  Brahms often looked to early music for models when writing music for the choir.  The mass was recently rediscovered, and shows some clear relationships to pieces that were eventually published, such as the Op. 74 motet no. 1.
    Ockeghem's reknown in music history may serve as a model for the reputation of the entire series of Franco-Flemish composers, most of whom engaged in canonic artifice.  Although he only wrote two fugae, these two, together with the Missa Cuiusvis toni (which the Capella is performing in May) were praised to the exclusion of all of his other works by 16th century theorists such as Glareanus.  This celebration of Ockeghem's skills soured in the next generations of music commentators, as tastes for canonic composition diminished.  Thus in 1776, Charles Burney would write about Ockeghem's cerebral works, "These compositions are given rather as specimens of a determined spirit of patient perseverance, than as models of imitation.  In music, different from all other arts, learning and labour seem to have preceded taste and invention, from both which the times under consideration are still very remote."  Only now in the late 20th century has a full reassessment of Ockeghem and the Franco-Flemish "constructivist" composers begun.  Tastes have changed, and the canon is once more considered a valid device, offering composers a means to attain a contrapuntal unity in the midst of a bewildering variety of modern harmonic possibilities.  No doubt something of the same purpose stimulated 15th century composers in their pursuit of the subtleties of the canon.

Capella Alamire was formed in 1984 for the purpose of exploring the repertoire of the renaissance. The word Alamire is a solmization term for the pitch A, sung as la, mi, or re; it was also the pseudonym of a Flemish music scribe employed by the Habsburg court, ca.1500, in the Netherlands and northern France, a region that produced many of the greatest composers and singers of the time.
 

Capella Alamire
Peter Urquhart, director

Michael Spillane Betsy Hopkins
Terry Halco                James Hankins
Melinda McMahon               George Waldrep
Charles Turner                                       Sudie Blatz
Todd Beckham                                            Donald Irving


Capella Alamire would like to thank the following for their support and assistance:

Christ Church United, Lowell                      Centralville Methodist Church, Lowell
Music Dept., Univ. of New Hampshire                  Church of the Messiah, Newton
First Congregational Church of Cambridge                   St. Joseph's Church, Dover
St. Georges's Episcopal Church, Durham          Isham Library, Harvard University