Composers over the centuries have from time to time indulged themselves in musical tricks and jokes--Mozart even wrote a canon the text for which is too obscene to even mention in this family-oriented blog! But for sheer ingenious complexity it is hard to beat the 15th century, though Bach certainly tried. Perhaps the trickiest of a whole bunch of tricky pieces is the Agnus Dei II from Josquin des Prez's Missa L'Homme Armé super voces musicales.
Composers of the time, like Ockeghem, were famous for feats of contrapuntal virtuosity such as composing canons in which one voice is identical to another voice--just as in "Row, row, row your boat"--but with the second voice being in a different tempo, which in the 15th century was achieved through a different time signature. The other voice could even be a transposition of the first voice! And in a different tempo. Here is the complete score to the Agnus Dei II from Josquin's Missa L'Homme Armé super voces musicales:
This is a canon for three voices, which is much, much harder than one for two. We know it is for three voices because it has three time signatures, what we nowadays would call "cut" time, "common" time and a funny one, "cut" time with a dot. These stand for three different "prolations" or divisions of the long notes. From where they are placed on the staff we can see that the three voices start on three different pitches. The rhythmic values of the lowest voice are divided in half in a second voice and into three in a third voice. Here is a very clever video first showing how the voices perform from the original notation and second, how it looks in modern staff notation.
4 comments:
I don't think I've tried writing a prolation canon yet and Josquin reminds me why. It's undoubtedly tough to do well. I managed to get the entire Tallis scholars CD cycle of the Josquin masses and this post reminds me I should get back to listening through those.
Listening to this and some Ockeghem and some of Bach's more elaborate contrapuntal constructions, I get an odd sort of feeling. The music is simultaneously highly organized, that is, with a predictable course, and at the same time, often surprising because the voice-leading is unusual at times. I get the same sensation with some of Bach's invertible counterpoint.
So this single line is simultaneously sung at 3 different speeds ('"prolations' of the long notes') in a canon. Would that make this line a ricercar?
I think the term ricercar came along a century later referring to an early type of fugue.
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