Author: Guest Author

Dr. Janet Hunt, FAGO, director of music at St. John Seminary in Boston, writes about her recent work:

The publication of my edition of sacred vocal music by the English composer Peter Philips is the result of a long yet enjoyable work process covering several years.  The new volume, 75 Motets for Two Solo Voices and Organ Continuo from Paradisus Sacris Cantionibus (1628) represents the bulk of an even larger collection of 107 motets last published posthumously in 1641, and is the first time these particular motets have appeared in print since then.  So, how did a harpsichordist/organist from Texas (me) end up editing Philips’ vocal music?

I became acquainted with Philips’ keyboard music while studying harpsichord in college and playing several selections by him found in The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. This large volume of keyboard music was collected by Sir Francis Tregian (1548-1608), an English Catholic imprisoned during the persecution of Catholics in Elizabethan England.  Several of the composers represented in the FVB were Catholic as well, and as I pursued their individual stories I became fascinated with those who chose to remain in England – William Byrd, for one – and those who fled to the Continent, such as Peter Philips.

Following initial musical training in London, Philips left England in 1582, “pour la foy Catholique” as he later stated.  He travelled to Rome, then to other cities in Italy, Spain and France before arriving in Brussels in 1590.  He entered the service of the Hapsburg Archduke Albert in 1597, and remained a member of the court chapel until his death.  Albert and his wife, Isabella, were sympathetic to recusant English musicians arriving at their court, where sacred music enhanced their frequent liturgies.  Moreover, they were people of great faith who supported public acts of piety in the form of Eucharistic and Marian processions in Brussels, as well as encouraged confraternities of lay people dedicated to the Catholic faith.  Both Brussels and nearby Antwerp had a thriving printing industry, and thus Philips’ compositions were published in the early 1600’s.

Almost four centuries later, I first heard a motet from Paradisus Sacris Cantionibus on a recording of a Belgian vocal ensemble.  Immediately attracted, I searched in vain for the scores, only to find that the group sang from copies they made from the original 1628 partbooks.  Over time, I discovered that Christ Church Library in Oxford, England possessed a complete set of partbooks, and I was able to obtain a microfilm copy, along with permission to prepare the edition.

The result is what I hope will be a welcome addition to a little-known genre, the accompanied small-scale motets of the early 17th century.  These works by composers such as Peter Philips, Felice Anerio, Richard Dering, and Giacomo Finetti, are set for one to four solo voices with organ accompaniment.  They embrace late Renaissance as well as early Baroque compositional traits, by combining occasional moments of imitative polyphony with Italianate expressive and florid solo passages.  The texts are taken from antiphons and responsories for various saints’ days.  Many Eucharistic and Marian-themed motets complete the collections, making them suitable for a variety of liturgical celebrations.

The Philips edition is available for purchase through the website http://www.huntmusic.us.

[Dr. Hunt has graciously allowed us to share a sample motet from the collection, Misericordias Domini.  The text is Psalm 88:1-3, 6; originally for the third nocturn, first psalm at Matins on December 25.]

[Here’s a practical tip submitted by reader Peter Kwasniewski.  Thanks!  He writes:]

Recently, I had occasion to type up for a friend a set of detailed instructions for using Sibelius 7.5 to prepare a nice-looking score for an organ accompaniment to an English plainchant. This information may be either totally beside the point if you’re not a Sibelius user, or totally superfluous if you’re already a master of it, but my friend, who was a rookie, found it helpful, so I wanted to pass along the written instructions.

[A sample score produced by this procedure is available at this link.]

1) Starting off 

• a. Launch Sibelius and create a new score: CTRL-N
• b. Click (once) on “Blank”
• c. Click on “Change instruments”
• d. Select “Organ [manuals],” then “Add to Score” and OK.
• e. Scroll down to Key Signature, select key.
• f. Enter title for piece.
• g. Click on “Create.”

2) Document setup

• a. Press CTRL-D.
• b. Make sure your unit is inches.
• c. Enter 0.28 as the Staff size.
• d. Select “Mirrored” for the margins and enter 0.8, 0.6, 1.0, and 0.8 for the margins, then OK.
• e. To remove bar numbers, go to “Text” menu, select “Numbering,” then select “No bar numbers.”

3) Creating the framework

• a. We will use 8th notes as our basic unit, corresponding to the punctum. Determine how many “measures” (as defined by full bars, half bars, or quarter bars) you are going to have in your score and how many 8th notes will be in each of these measures. If you need more measures, press CTRL-B to generate more. NB: Include one extra measure, for the empty space to follow after the end of the chant.
• b. Enter, for each measure, the needed time signature: ALT-C, T, then the numerator and denominator (e.g., 13/8, 16/8). Point the blue arrow at the measure that needs the time signature and click.

4) Entering the music

• a. Drag the “keypad” into a convenient location.
• b. With Voice 1 selected (that’s the blue box at the bottom of the keypad), select the 8th note, and then enter notes, either with the mouse, or using the letters on the keyboard.
• c. When you have entered the entire melody, go back and beam the groups of notes as you would like them to be. To do this, select a note, then select the third “page” of the keypad (it says “Beams/tremolos” when you hover the cursor over it), and select the appropriate option—e.g., the single note (“No beam” when you hover the cursor over it) will isolate a note by giving it its own flag, while the note with a beam going off to the right only (“Start beam” when you hover over it) will connect an isolated note to its neighbor.
• d. Now that your melody line looks the way it should, you can enter in the remaining notes—which we will call alto, tenor, and bass for convenience.
• e. To enter the alto, make sure all objects are cleared (hit ESC will always do this), select Voice 2 from the keypad (it’s the number 2 at the bottom and it will turn green when clicked), select your note value, and enter the notes in the treble clef just as you entered the melody.
• f. Do the same, in the bass clef, with Voice 1 for the tenor and Voice 2 for the bass.
• g. You won’t need Voice 3 or Voice 4 unless you intend to have more than 2 independent voices in either stave. If you ever need a chord in the treble or bass staff, you can create chords by inputting a note and then “piling up” notes on top of it using Arabic numerals (e.g., pressing ‘3’ will place a third on top of the note, or pressing ‘5’ a fifth).
• h. When all the notes have been entered, go back and highlight any note that needs to be tied to a subsequent note, and notes that need to be tied to successive notes, and select Tie from the keypad.
• i. Highlight all the time signatures and press Delete. This will make them disappear, although the measures will still retain the right number of 8th notes.

5) Adding episemas and quilismas

• a. To add an episema over one note, highlight the note(s), and from the keypad, select the “tenuto” symbol.
• b. To add an episema over multiple notes, highlight the first of the notes, press ALT-C, then L, scroll down till you get to the horizontal line, and click on it. Then, grab the highlighted square on its right side, and drag until the line is as long as you want it.
• c. To add a quilisma, highlight the note over which it is to appear, press Z, and choose the Inverted mordent.

6) Formatting barlines

• a. Highlight the full bars and convert them into short bars or ticks, as needed. To do this, highlight a given bar (or bars), go to the menu “Notations,” click on “Barline,” and select the kind you need.
• b. Highlight the very last barline and change it to an “Invisible” barline. If the program spontaneously creates another bar at the end, just highlight it and delete it, and you should end up with a final bar without a barline.
• c. Highlight the second-to-last barline and change it to a “Double” barline.
• d. To make the final measure wider, click in the middle of the invisible bar, and, while still holding down the mouse button, drag the mouse rightwards. This will increase the width of the final measure and decrease the width of the preceding measure(s). (Of course, dragging the mouse leftwards will do the opposite.)
• e. If you want to indent the first system, select the bar line furthest to the left, and drag with the mouse rightwards.
• f. NB: You can split a bar in the middle by selecting the note where you’d like the split to take place and then choosing, from the Home menu, the Split option, then click OK.

7) Entering the words

• a. Highlight the note where you wish to begin entering text.
• b. Go to “Text” menu, select “Lyrics,” then “Lyrics above staff.” 
• c. You will see a blinking cursor above the note. Begin typing in the text. Use hyphens to separate syllables and the space bar to skip over notes.
• d. To include a mode number at the start of the antiphon, type in the number and period, then CTRL-SPACE, followed by the first syllable of text. (This will keep the mode number and first syllable together rather than treating the number as if it was its own syllable.)
• e. When you need an asterisk after a syllable, do the same: [syllable], CTRL-SPACE, [asterisk], then SPACE and the rest of the words.

8) Putting in a number for the chant

• a. If you need to give the chant a number because it’s part of a series of chants, double-click the instrument title on the left (“Organ”) and backspace to delete the instrument name.
• b. Right click with the mouse on any blank spot on the music score. This will pull up a menu.
• c. In the menu, hover the cursor over “Text.”
• d. Move the cursor rightwards, over “Other Staff Text.”
• e. Move the cursor over “Plain text” and click.
• f. The arrow will turn blue. Point it to any blank spot near where you want the number to appear.
• g. Type the number, followed by a period, and press ESC to fix the number in place.
• h. While leaving the number in blue, press CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-T to get the Styles menu.
• i. It should already have “Plain text” highlighted on the list, but if not, scroll down and select “Plain text.”
• j. Then click on “Edit” (or press ALT-E).
• k. There are four boxes with numbers next to “Size in score” and “Size in parts.” Highlight the upper left of these numbers and change to desired point size (let’s say, 18 point).
• l. Then click “OK” or press ENTER.
• m. Then click “Close” or press ENTER.
• n. Using your mouse, move the number wherever you want it on the page.
• o. To indent the top system, click on the very barline prior to the clefs and, while holding the mouse button, drag rightwards.
• p. Once you have two systems on the page, you’ll need to highlight the abbreviated instrument name (“Org.”) and simply delete it.

Priest and servers, in a Good Friday procession in Popayán

[J. Richard Haefer completes his guest columns about a Holy Week visit to Colombia and to the Festival of Religious Music at Popayán:]

As I was not writing during the Triduum and, after Easter, we took a trip into the heart of the Andes, to the Santuario de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Las Lajas, by narrow roads with deep ravines on one or both sides, this last report will reach you in the Easter season.

The concerts of Holy Thursday and Friday noon were strictly secular: strange, since they are the most sacred days of the week. Thursday noon saw a presentation of music for flute and piano by the Barcelona flautist Patricia de No accompanied by Cristina Casale from England (the online information is incorrect), including works by C. P. E. Bach (1714-1788), François Poulenc (1899-1963), the Hungarian Franz Doppler (1821-1883) and twentieth-century composers Gary Shocker (U.S.A., b. 1959), Astor Piazolla (Argentina, 1821-1992) and Francois Borne (Spain, 1840-1920).

The evening concert featured one of five professional orchestras of Colombia: Orquesta Sinfónica de EAFIT (consisting of faculty and students from EAFIT university in Medellin and organized in 2000) and conducted by Cecilia Espinosa of Wednesday’s Coro de Cámara “Arcadia”. The opening overture by Emil von Rezncek (1860-1945) was quite delightful and the highlight of the program. Astor Piazzolla’s “Estacione Porteñas” is certainly a candidate for a concert of “disaster pieces of music.” Several sections ended with quotes from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and one section featured the cellos playing the ostinato from Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The violin soloist, Oksana Solovieva, born in Russia but raised in the West, did a splendid performance of the solo parts despite the mundane nature of the composition. With so many excellent contemporary Latin American composers it is too bad this trite piece was chosen. Sibelius’ Symphony number 2 (Op. 43) concluded the concert.

At noon on Holy Friday the ensemble Macondo Chamber Players (string quintet, piano and oboe) presented works by Mozart, Borodin, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms. While interesting, none would qualify for use in any religious situation.

On Friday evening the Orquesta Sinfónica de EAFIT, along with the Coros de Cámara de Popayán, Arcadia, and Los Gatos presented Brahms’ German Requiem, Op. 45. A wonderful balance between choruses and the low strings opened the composition but soon the full orchestra overpowered the singers, as happens with many orchestra conductors. As with the previous evening and the concert by Arcadia, the overall sound was flat and unchanging throughout this wonderful composition. The highlight was the solo by baritone Valeriano Lanchas and the soprano solo by local singer Julie Fernández was also well done.

As for the festival as a whole, it was certainly successful. The audience for nearly every concert was full, with admission free except for the last two evenings. With the exception of the latter, the audience was a mix of townsfolk and tourists with many locals attending all the free programs. It was interesting to see the appreciation for music in general as nary a program was left behind, unlike at concerts in the U.S., where programs are scattered on the floor of the concert hall.  As the director of the festival (Dra. Stella Dupont) refused my request for an interview, I have no idea how the groups were chosen or any details of the arrangements. While the organizers tried to obtain advance information about the concerts and performers, it is likely that some were booked at the last minute, and the program booklet was filled with editorial errors. I assume that no restrictions were imposed as regards repertoire, though I would have preferred to have at least some religious music on every concert.

I will complete this report by mentioning a little about the state of church music in Colombia and about the second reason I chose to be in Popayán during Holy Week.

To date I have witnessed church music in Colombia only in Bogotá and Popayán, and I am sorry to report that it is as dismal as in most Spanish-speaking parishes in the United States: multiple guitar players and some percussion, with happy-clappy songs, clapping often encouraged by the priests (and, of course, altar girls). Brethren, we have a long way to come to return the dignity of the Mass to its proper state.

Our Lady of Sorrows, in the Good Friday night procession

As to Holy Week in Popayán: as in many cities in Spain (especially in Castile, León, Murcia, and Andalusia), in Colombia in the cities of Pamplona, Monpox, and especially Popayán, nightly processions are held throughout Holy Week. Carried in the processions are life-size statues and groups of statues arranged in biblical Passion scenes, each paso carried by eight Cargueros, all men. The processions last up to four hours and demand much endurance, especially since some of the streets are hilly. In Popayán family groups support each paso, while in Spain the pasos are organized by brotherhoods, and one or two dozen men carry the larger Spanish pasos.

Each day is devoted to a particular topic: Friday of Passion Week, “Friday of Sorrows;” Palm Sunday, the Passion; Tuesday of Holy Week, Our Lady of Sorrows; Wednesday, the Love of Jesus; Thursday, “Our Lord of the True Cross”; Friday, the “Funeral of Christ”; and Saturday, “Jesus Christ Resurrected.” Appropriate statues and scenes illustrate each procession, numbering from seven to seventeen pasos.

Also included in each procession are bands and choruses, as well as the Archbishop of Popayán, priests from each of the churches from which the different processions start, and various dignitaries (including local members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem). Dies Irae on Friday, and two choruses even sang traditional Latin hymns. The bands marched at a pace of about 30 beats per minute and the Cargueras stopped about every half-block to rest the pasos, weighing over 400 pounds each. In a future paper I will be discussing the religious-commercial-patrimonial “conflict” of the modern Popayán Holy Week processions, with input from interviews with various people involved with the events.

In the earlier processions, the bands played secular music — the large drum sections could be heard five to ten blocks away — while during the Triduum Spanish religious songs were played, as well as the

If you have enjoyed these reports or would like more information, please feel free to contact me.

[Thanks to Dr. Haefer (rhaefer at asu.edu) for the guest contributions. — Ed.]

[We continue J. Richard Haefer’s account of this year’s Festival de Música Religiosa de Popayán.]

The Coro de Cámera ‘Arcadia’, a semi-professional chorus from Medellín, presented a concert of predominantly 20th-century religious music. Due to the variety of contemporary vocal expressions and harmonies the works are best suited for concert performance and not for church usage. The opening Kyrie by the Argentinean composer Alberto Balzanelli (b. 1941) utilized Sprechstimme, whispers, shouts, and dissonant harmonies in seconds and constant interaction of all of these elements. A hugh dynamic climax ended the Christe section. The word Kyrie was probably repeated more than a hundred times. Though not suitable for Mass it was a very interesting piece and very well presented. Some of his many contemporary religious compositions can be heard on YouTube.

The exact identity of the composer of the Salve Regina was unclear from the program but I believe it to be the Venezuelan César Alejandro Carrillo and not the Puerto Rican Carlos Carillo. Both have written contemporary religious music as did the Mexican Julio Carrillo who composed for more than 32 divisions of the octave. The Salve Regina provided a more pleasant melody than that of Balzanelli, however, alternating modal and tonal harmonies with sections of much dissonance. Czech Composer L. Zedneck’s [Zdněk?] Parabolas Salomonis (text based on Venerable Bede’s writings) may be characterized as very dissonant with much “shouting” of the text. Similar to the previous was Javier Busto Sagrado’s O Magnum Mysterium with male Sprechstimme over dissonant oohs and hums of the ladies ending with extremely loud dynamics. Busto is a prolific composer of religious music for various voicings. Arcadia Director Cecilia Espinosa’s forte is the presentation of contemporary music but unfortunately the overall sound seemed the same with predominant blend problems in the soprano section.

The latter half of the concert provided a nice change of harmonies beginning with Bruckner’s motet Os justi (1879) based on the Gradual of the Commune Doctorum. (Vulgate, Ps. 36). The choir struggled with the Lydian mode but was able to recover. The motet ends with a short Alleluia sung in unison and repeated. Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah (a text for Holy Thursday) was written as two motets. The choir performed both the Aleph and Beth sections, the latter a nice predominantly homorhythmic section, composed in five voice parts performed as SATTB though they lacked any subtlety and again the sopranos dominated the sound. Victoria’s Sancta Maria sucurre miseria was a much better presentation, though there were intonation problems in many of the melismas. The choir appeared tired throughout the second half of the program. O vos omnes by the Catalan Pau Casals (1876-1973) began with two-voice male imitative lines, gradually adding the alto and soprano lines to moderately modern harmonies, thus ending the religious works.

Secular compositions by F. Ochoa (“Rising Sun”), V. Agudelo (Ensalada de verdugas, a silly song sung in chef hats and aprons with spoons and bowls for rhythm instruments), and A. Gallo (Invierno) concluded the program. Interspersed was a nice villancico by J. de Aroujo, Los Coflades de la Estleya.

Written for two soloists and chorus, the Coro performed it with baroque guitar accompaniment and drum and hand clapping. The performance was the highlight of the program for me. While contemporary music appears to be the emphasis of the conductor and chorus, their overall sound was monotonous despite the variety of vocal techniques in the music.

One of the best performances of the Festival de Música Religiosa de Popayán occurred at 5PM in the theatre. The brilliant Colombian baritone Valeriano Lanchas performed the complete Schubert’s Der Winterreise. Not religious, but spectacular! [Here he performs Verdi’s Confutatis.]

No religious music for Holy Thursday’s concerts, but perhaps I will write more about the Processions and the music accompanying them.