The Marian Consort

Rome—famously described by the fourteenth-century painter Giotto Di Bondone as ‘the city of echoes’— is the focus of this evening’s program, which traces the echoes, resonances, and patterns of influence that exist between some of the greatest musical minds of the sixteenth century who lived and worked there.

We begin with the extraordinarily beautiful Ave Maria … virgo serena by Josquin Desprez, a member of the papal chapel choir in the final decades of the fifteenth century and one of several French composers connected with the institution whose music would prove seminal throughout the sixteenth century. It is an echo in both figurative and literal senses: likely inspired by an earlier setting by the composer Johannes Regis, it begins with all four voices in turn repeating the same musical phrase, one derived from the Ave Maria plainchant melody. After the opening section, Josquin has the soprano and tenor voices continue this precise imitation for much of the remainder of the motet, a technique which appears in a number of his Marian works, including the six-voice Benedicta es, caelorum regina which we performed in our concert as part of the 2024–25 Miller Theatre Early Music series.

This motet, where the two voices in imitation (again the soprano and tenor) sing almost exactly the Benedicta es plainchant throughout the lengthy first section, would prove an inspiration to the ‘prince and father of music’ and perhaps sixteenth-century Rome’s most famous musical denizen, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Born in the village just outside Rome from which he takes his name, Palestrina spent nearly his entire career in the ‘Eternal City,’ arriving in 1551 to take up the position of magister cantorum of the Cappella Giulia, followed by subsequent appointments at San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Cappella Sistina, whose archive contains his Missa Benedicta es. Following established practice for imitation mass composition, Palestrina borrows melodic ideas from his musical model in roughly sequential order across the three sections of the Kyrie, modifying and recombining them in a skillful act of both homage and technical showmanship.

The year 1551 would also prove to be an important year in Rome for Vicente Lusitano, a ‘pardo’ or mixed-race Portuguese composer of dual European and African parentage. Barred by fact of his ethnicity from the church positions enjoyed by his peers, Lusitano appears in the city as music tutor to the son of Dom Afonso de Lencastre, Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See. Lusitano’s only surviving printed book of compositions, the Liber Primus epigramatum, was issued in Rome in 1551, and in this same year he was involved in one of the most notorious events in sixteenth-century music history. Better known in his own time as a music theorist than a composer, his widely reported debate with Nicola Vicentino, which took place throughout June 1551, centered on a performance of Lusitano’s motet Regina caeli laetare, ideas around permissible chromaticism in music, and the application of the Ancient Greek genera in contemporary composition. Despite the Italian Vicentino having the home field advantage, Lusitano was declared the winner of their debate, as judged by a panel of eminent Roman musicians including Ghiselin Danckerts, a composer, writer, and longtime member of the Sistine Chapel choir. Danckerts’ eight-voice Laetamini in Domino, which includes the masterly technical conceit of a repeating cantus firmus in the second soprano part, appears in two mid-sixteenth-century German collections.

Of the same generation as Josquin, fellow Frenchman Jean Mouton spent much of his career in the employ of the French royal court, and despite never holding a position outside of France, a great deal of his music is found copied in Cappella Sistina manuscripts, with several contemporary sources attesting to his being one of Pope Leo X’s favorite composers. Ave Maria gemma virginum is a supreme display of compositional craft (and perhaps the ultimate Renaissance echo), being an exact 8 ex 4 canon where the upper four voices sing precisely the same music as the lower four voices but an octave higher and four semibreves later, with all eight parts skillfully overlapping throughout to create a work that is as striking for its beauty as for its complexity. Of the generation after Mouton, Jean l’Héritier, described by at least one contemporary as a disciple of Josquin, spent much of his career in Italy, including nearly a decade in Rome in the first quarter of the sixteenth century as a singer at both the papal court and S Luigi dei Francesi. His sublime six-voice Surrexit pastor bonus survives in a choirbook for the Cappella Giulia and in some of its more adventurous harmonic moments prefigures the music of both Lusitano and Orlande de Lassus.

Lassus arrived in Rome from Naples in 1551 to take up employment in the Roman household of Antonio Altoviti, the Archbishop of Florence, before becoming maestro di cappella at San Giovanni in Laterano in the spring of 1553. His

Regina caeli laetare for seven voices adopts a boisterous attitude inspired by the upbeat text, sharing with Lusitano a free approach to the quotation of the plainchant. Tomás Luis de Victoria, like Lusitano an Iberian immigrant to Rome, spent more than twenty years training and working in the city, chiefly at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico. He was a prolific composer and publisher of sacred music, frequently revising and reissuing his works, and the eight-voice Ave Regina caelorum (one of two settings of this text by Victoria) appears in no fewer than five of his printed collections. Combining the harmonic nuance of his Iberian upbringing with the smooth fluency of Roman polyphonic writing (he may have studied with Palestrina), it moves from thrilling antiphonal exchanges to fuller eight-voice polyphony for climactic moments, with two changes into triple meter injecting rhythmic energy, the first to underscore the message of the text at ‘Gaude gloriosa.’

As a particular mark of respect, Victoria included a motet by his contemporary Francesco Soriano in his 1585 motet publication: Soriano was, like his fellow Roman Felice Anerio, a choirboy in the city, in Soriano’s case under Palestrina at San Giovanni in Laterano. Soriano would later hold positions at many of the same churches as his mentor and published an arrangement of Palestrina’s iconic Missa Papae Marcelli in his own 1609 book of masses. Soriano expands the texture from six voices to eight, making explicit the implicit polychorality of Palestrina’s original by dividing the music between two distinct choirs.

Also in a deliberate act of homage, Vicente Lusitano chose to base several of the large-scale motets in his 1551 collection on works by Josquin. Setting the same texts as three of Josquin’s most famous Marian motets, Lusitano preserves and emphasizes certain characteristics in a loving act of ‘parody’, with a dose of ‘anything you can do, I can do better’ thrown in for good measure! Of the three Josquin parodies, the eight-voice Inviolata is the most striking. Unmistakably indebted to Josquin’s five-voice setting, it is also radically different, exchanging the sparse textures of the turn of the century for the richer, dense, kaleidoscopic polyphony of his own generation. Preserving Josquin’s division of text and relative musical stasis, Lusitano embeds the same structural device at the heart of his work (a canon at the interval of a fifth and the distance of three breves, based perhaps inevitably on the plainchant associated with the text), a compositional conceit which does nothing to detract from the sheer beauty of the music.