Nora Beck (Lewis and Clark College): The Trecento Madrigal's Early Pastoral Landscape
This paper explores the origin of the madrigal and its connection to the Euganei Hills outside the city of Padua. Early Trecento madrigals refer to the Euguane, women who inhabited these hills in ancient times. These include the anonymous Pyance la bella yguana and Giovanni da Cascia's Nascoso el viso, stava fra le fronde. Several Paduan Trecento texts describe the madrigal's association with the pastoral tradition. The anonymous writer of the Capitulum applicatis verbis, active in the Veneto region around 1315, The texts of madrigals should be about shepherdesses, flowers, orchards, garlands, fields and the like, but in good subject-matter, language and expression.
Antonio da Tempo, a Paduan lawyer and man of letters, described the etymology of "madrigal" as originating from "mandriale", or mandria.
In the late fifteenth century the two native song genres of romance and villancico were actively written and performed in Spain. Romances – narrative, strophic works – had a relatively ancient pedigree while villancicos, which were refrain songs, had developed more recently. Modern scholarship has dealt with these two types separately, considering questions of formulaic performance and epic ballad ancestry for the romance, but looking at the villancico as the starting place for a genre that developed into a vastly different work by the late sixteenth century. That romances and villancicos were often combined into a two-part song (sometimes by some of Spain’s early playwrights) is a fact that has been largely overlooked.
This paper will outline the links between romances and villancicos that are apparent in late fifteenth-century prints and manuscripts and will show how those connections would have been interpreted in actual performance. It will also examine the relationship between these song pairs and similar villancico use that occurs in early Spanish theater pieces, demonstrating that similar performative issues and goals were present in both.
In the early 15th century, the isorhythmic motet was a genre that attracted the most learned composers. Motets served as impressive occasional pieces, but could also serve as vehicles for imitation: composers frequently based motets upon earlier motets, as evidenced by subtle structural and textual relationships among works. This paper will comment upon the political nature of a small repertoire of surviving English motets, and will present two case studies of motets related to a specific event or situation. We have long known that a trio of motets in the Old Hall manuscript by Damett, Cooke, and Sturgeon were sung at, and probably written for Henry V’s triumphal entry into London in 1415, following his victory over the French at Agincourt. It has also been posited that another Old Hall motet, Byttering’s En Katherine sollenia, and Dunstaple’s Salve scema sanctitatis were connected in some way to the wedding of Henry V and Catherine de Valois. I will argue that both motets, which have a clear structural relationship, were composed for a second triumphal entry, on February 21, 1421—welcoming Henry and his bride to London—or for Katherine’s coronation in Westminster Abbey two days later. There are even clearer intertextualities between two Deo gratias motets from Old Hall: Are post libamina attributed to “Mayshuet” is clearly modelled upon the anonymous Post missarum sollennia, which is in turn modelled upon an anonymous French motet of the mid 14th century. While Deo gratias motets were relatively common in late medieval England, the texts of these two motets can be related to larger political and religious issues of concern to the English Royal house. In particular, the newly-composed texts of Are post libamina relate to royal efforts to maintain orthodoxy in the face of an increasing tide of Lollard heresy. Remarkably, the triplum text of Are post libamina also appears to describe the musical processes that created these motets.
William Mundy composed the votive antiphon _Vox patris caelestis_ during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58), a period of intense Catholic revival after the austerities of the Edwardian Reformation. The reception of _Vox patris_ has been problematic. It is a self-consciously archaic piece, among the last examples of its genre, and it has become a favorite illustration of "end-stage Gothic tendency" in surveys of Tudor music. Some modern listeners, while recognizing its beauty, also criticize it for its "extravagant" poetry, unwieldy dimensions, or lack of recourse to the usual expressive devices of the era.
The key to _Vox patris_ is found in a closer examination of its text and of the musical techniques Mundy uses to articulate it. Unlike earlier votive antiphons, it refers to a specific liturgical and theological event, one of great importance to mid-16th-century English Catholicismthe Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is an elaborate network of tropes on the Song of Songs, interwoven with other scriptural topics, all traditionally linked to the Assumption. The musical composition of the piece follows the rhetoric and symbolism of the text, which is essentially constructed as a sermon in miniature.
The most extensive parallels are found in Conrad of Saxony's _Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis_, a late medieval homiletic handbook circulated in England well into the sixteenth century. _Vox patris_ also reflects similar treatments of the Assumption in the _Golden Legend_, English mystery plays, devotional poems, and contemporary sermons.
Links between Mundy's own choir at St. Mary-at-Hill, the singers of the Chapel Royal, the musical observance of the Assumption in London during Queen Mary's reign, and the manuscript sources of _Vox patris_ suggest a possible context for its composition and performance.