Day 290
Dufay: Missa Ave Celorum
Cantica Symphonia
Kees Boeke
This is astonishing music - it has so many facets - it looks forward to mellifluous renaissance counterpoint and back towards medieval, more astringent, music. And at times there were choral progressions which seemed almost to foreshadow Baroque harmony. Some pars of the music were rhythmically highly complex , where the voices seems almost completely independent of each other.
It does beg the question of how this music was originally performed. We have all the usual questions of how many voices were involves, what speeds was the music taken at, what expressive nuances were employed, and whether instrument were used to double/substitute for the voices. On this recording instruments are used fairly freely - sometime just to highlight a short melodic passage in one voice - at others to take over vocal lines completely. To my untrained ear much of this sounded convincing but how might it originally have been done. As far as I know this music was written in individual parts rather than what we would now think of as a vocal score. How did they rehearse such complex music? Surely they must have rehearsed - even the most experienced musicians would surely not have been able to deal with all of the difficulties at sight. So if they did rehears did somebody lead the rehearsal in a way that a modern choirmaster might? And would he have had a score. However otherwise would be have know that everything was together in the right place. All sorts of question to be answers. I imagine specialists in this music do have some of the answers but I doubt that we will ever have the complete picture.
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