Masterpieces of Music: Orlande de Lassus

This is a portrait of Orlande de Lassus, who flourished roughly a hundred years after Josquin. He was born around 1532 and died in 1594. Coincidentally, he was born in the same part of what is now Belgium as Josquin, the Hainaut region. He was enormously prolific, composing over 2000 works, and we know far more about his life than we do about that of Josquin. His music, along with that of Palestrina and Victoria, is the culmination of the Renaissance in music. Also like Josquin and Dufay, he was a singer and his music is primarily vocal, though many transcriptions were made for instrumental ensemble and solo lute. He was famous for a style of music called musica reservata, the meaning of which is now fiercely disputed. It seems to refer to music that was written for connoisseurs using particularly advanced techniques, such as chromaticism. In that sense, it is the beginning of the breakdown of the modal harmonies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance which ultimately led, during the early Baroque, to the development of tonal harmony which is still in use today.

As a young man of twenty-eight, Lassus wrote a set of pieces for choir called Prophetiae Sibyllarum that are a famous example of this style. The work consists of 12 motets on texts about ancient prophecies from the sibyls, oracles of antiquity, who purportedly predicted the coming of Jesus Christ. There is a brief prologue titled "Carmina chromatico" on the text:

Carmina chromatico quae audis modulata tenore, 

Haec sunt illa quibus nostrae olim arcana salutis 

Bis senae intrepido cecinerunt ore Sibyllae.

Polyphonic songs which you hear with a chromatic tenor, 

these are they, in which our twice-six sibyls once 

sang with fearless mouth the secrets of salvation.

Here is a performance of this prologue:

And here is what the score looks like:

Click to enlarge

Let's see what is going on there. The piece is in what is usually called the Mixolydian mode or G to G on the piano with no black keys. This name comes from the ancient Greek modes, but their concept of mode was completely different. The church retained the names, but over the millenia, the notes changed. By this time, as I said above, the development of chromaticism is starting to break down the purity of the modal system. Here are the chords we hear from the beginning, all in root position: C major, G major, B major, C# minor, E major, F# minor, G major, C major, F major, Bb major, D major, C minor (in first inversion), D major cadencing on G major. And that's just the first line and the first beat of the second line! In terms of the harmony we are used to, tonal harmony, this is completely incoherent. These chords just don't go together in a logical way. So how does Lassus make it work? I assume that you agree with me that it does indeed work? Well, we have to remember a couple of things: Lassus was a singer writing for other singers and he, like all musicians of his time, thought horizontally, not vertically as we tend to think of harmony now. He really wasn't thinking of harmony in our sense at all, but of chromatic melody. If you look at each vocal line separately, it moves smoothly from one note to another. There are few leaps. Most of the movement is by step, with occasional leaps of a third or a fifth. This is a fundamental principle that has governed harmony for a very long time: if you approach, and especially depart, from a chord by step, you can go to almost any extreme. But the preparation and exit are crucial. Since he is thinking like a singer, in terms of the horizontal line, this is instinctive. Here is a different performance of the whole piece:

A couple of things you may have noticed: this version is accompanied by a lute, which is quite feasible. At this point in time most music was vocal, but instruments could be used to either double or replace some or all of the voices. Another thing you might notice is while this is very definitely counterpoint with each voice moving independently, it is not imitative counterpoint. The voices rarely imitate or echo one another. This is simply free counterpoint.

Masterpieces of Music: Josquin des Prez

After Guillaume Dufay the next really important composer is Josquin des Prez, born near Hainaut in territory belonging to the Dukes of Burgundy and passed away in the same region in 1521 after a career that took him to Milan, Rome, France and Ferrara. He is one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, a period particularly rich in music. He came at a time when the printing of music was just beginning and Josquin's music was a favorite of the early printers. Indeed, music by Josquin was so highly valued that they often printed music attributed to him but actually by another composer. Recent scholarship has been devoted to paring down the list of works to those only by Josquin.

Josquin was a master of complex musical forms but also wrote short, saucy pieces. Here is "Petite Camusette":

He composed many settings of the mass using a variety of techniques such as basing one voice on a pre-existing melody, the cantus firmus, or using variations of a melody in all voices, or creating melodic material by encoding a name or phrase in musical notes (the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae uses notes drawn from the musical syllables of the Duke's own name: Re – Ut – Re – Ut – Re – Fa – Mi – Re, in English names for the notes, D C D C D F E D), or by structuring the music in canonic form.


Canon is one of those musical ideas that most of us encounter early on in school when we are taught to sing the round (another name for canon) "Row, row, row your boat" or "Frère Jacques" perhaps. Both are very simple tunes that can be sung by overlapping with themselves. For example, "Row, row, row your boat" is sung at an interval of one measure, four beats. That is, the second voice or singer, comes in when the first voice starts the second measure. This is so easy to demonstrate, but hard to put in words! "Frère Jacques" is sung at an interval of two measures, eight beats:

The idea of using a melody to accompany itself is one of those ideas that fascinates musicians. It is the musical equivalent of one of those M. C. Escher drawings:

There are a lot of ways to write a canon other than having the second voice exactly copy the first. For example, in Josquin's mass Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales, he uses what are called "mensuration" canons extensively. In this type of canon, the voice that follows the leader does so in different rhythmic values. For example, the second section of the Agnus Dei from the mass is in three voices. The middle voice is the slowest. All voices start together and the lower voice is the same as the middle voice, but twice as fast, and the upper voice is the same as the middle, but three times as fast. Here, from Wikipedia, is the opening showing the relationship between the voices:

Click to enlarge

And here is a performance. The passage shown in notation above is heard at the very beginning:

Unearthly music... Here, for contrast is a frottola--a popular song form in Italy at this time--on the Latin text "In te domini speravi", which was supposedly written to remind a cardinal that he owned Josquin money:

Different Flavors of Classical Music

I said in a previous post that the term 'classical' music is a back-formation, meaning that until popular music became an economically huge force, there was just music with different flavors for different purposes. For listening, you went to the symphony or a chamber or lieder recital, for dancing you had Viennese walzes--just to choose a couple of examples. But once recording technology and television came along, popular music grew to dwarf what we now call 'classical' music. My view is that any music that has long-lasting value, of whatever genre or style, will sooner or later become 'classical' in the sense of "the best that has been done". As you may have noticed, I place the oeuvre of the Beatles in that category.

That aside, people new to classical music notice that it comes in different flavors. The repertoire of symphony orchestras roughly spans the period from when the symphony was invented, mostly by Joseph Haydn around 1770, to the present day, though in the current environment most composers do not choose the symphony as the main focus of their work. But we can divide this repertoire into phases. The Classical phase includes Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven--and possibly Schubert. But between 1820 and 1830 a new spirit came to be: that of Romanticism. This is a bit confusing because we use the word 'classical' in two senses. In one sense it is all that music that is not popular. But in the narrower sense it means music of a particular historical period: from 1770 to the death of Beethoven in 1827. The Romantic phase of 'classical' music starts from then and goes to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Composers like Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Bruckner, Mahler, Liszt and Wagner are all Romantic composers.

Another interesting thing happened in the 19th century: there began to be more interest in the music of the past than ever before. This really started in 1829 when Mendelssohn organized a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Berlin one hundred years after it was first performed in Leipzig. Even though composers like Beethoven had studied the works of Bach, he was not well-known among the general listening public. This changed radically during the 19th and 20th centuries. Bach is from the period known as the Baroque, or what we might call pre-Classical classical music. It was not just Bach that was re-discovered. He brought along with him a host of other Baroque composers like Rameau, a couple of Couperins, Froberger, Corelli and, that bane of background music, the Vivaldi Four Seasons. After that, it was easy to develop an interest in pre-Baroque music and today we have lutenists and madrigal groups that go around playing Renaissance music. There are also ensembles that go further back to the Middle Ages. The wonderful thing is that we have discovered outstanding pieces of music going right back to the beginnings of Western music around the year 1000.

I won't talk about the discovery of non-Western music here, but that has been a trend for the last fifty years or so. But I should mention what came after the Romantic period. In the early 20th century there was a great paroxysm in Western Civilization. One symptom was World War I, followed by the sequel, World War II. Some have called this a "suicide attempt by Western Civilization". There were similar events in music as well. The organization of music in terms of the modes or scales was overthrown with the development of atonal music and the incorporation of percussion, noises and chance procedures. The names to note are Schoenberg, Berg and Webern on the one hand and Cage, Stockhausen and Varese on the other. The first group followed the traditions of using ordinary instruments but in an atonal context; the latter group incorporated new instruments, electronics, noise and chance procedures. It is still an open question whether much of this music will become 'classical' in my sense of the word. I'm sure that some will, but much won't.

So there you have a quick march through several different flavors of classical music. Now for some listening. Here is a piece from the early 20th century that I am fairly sure will become a 'classic' if it isn't already. The Lyric Suite for string quartet by Alban Berg, completed in 1926: