"The Little Church Around the Corner"
One East 29th Street, New York
MUSIC NOTES:
Holy Week through the Easter Vigil
Holy Week brings together themes of penitence, the Holy Eucharist and the Passion narrative, themes which are challenging and yet essential to Christian theology. Unlike Christmas, the themes of which can easily be secularized and romanticized, Holy Week and Easter are much more focused, and engagement with these liturgies requires both effort and faith. The same can be said of the music for Holy Week, which tends to be more intense, more demanding, more tightly interwoven with complex theology than Christmas music.
Holy Week traditionally opens with the great processional hymn, All Glory, Laud and Honor. This hymn has been associated with Palm Sunday since the eighth century, when its text was first written by St. Theodulph, the Bishop of Orléans. In Salisbury Cathedral in the late Middle Ages, each verse was sung in Sarum plainsong first by the choirboys, and then repeated by the congregation. Since the 16th century, the familiar melody by Melchior Teschner (1585-1635) has carried St. Theodulph's text, which in turn carries us back to Jerusalem to relive the entry of Christ into that city.
The Venetian composer Antonio Lotti (1667-1740) is best known for one composition, his eight-part setting of the Crucifixus etiam pro nobis from the Creed. Though written at the height of the Italian baroque, this piece, with its highly-charged dissonances and tensions, hearkens back to the style of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613).
On Maundy Thursday, with its Eucharistic focus, the music is drawn from the repertoire of France, a country with a long tradition of almost mystical devotion to the Eucharist. The music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) and Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) offers examples of this tradition as expressed in the 20th century. Le Banquet Céleste was Messiaen's first published work, begun in 1926 and completed in 1928. It is a profoundly introspective piece, inspired by the songs of birds as heard in the French village of Fuligny in the Aube, where the piece was composed. Duruflé's Ubi caritas and Tantum ergo are four-part choral meditations on the ancient Gregorian melodies which are intimately bound up with these well-known devotional texts. Duruflé's Mass setting Cum Jubilo is also based on plainsong, with its thematic material drawn from the beautiful and enduring melodies of Mass IX from the Liber Usualis.
On Good Friday, highly expressive texts are carried by music that spans many centuries. Whether plainsong or polyphony, the music conveys the sense of restraint that prevails throughout this service, the only day of the church year in which the Eucharist is not celebrated. The Reproaches of Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) were composed specifically for use during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday. They are taken from his Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae (Office of Holy Week) of 1585, one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance liturgical music, and one of the most extensive compilations of Holy Week music ever to be undertaken. Healey Willan's (1880-1968) setting of Faithful Cross was also composed for the Veneration of the Cross. Willan employs the technique of alternatim, long familiar to Western liturgies, in which plainsong and harmonized music are interleaved one with the other. The hymn Pange, lingua, gloriosi (text by Bishop Venantius Fortunatus [530-509]) is sung in plainsong, with each stanza followed by a harmonized responsory on the Crux fidelis, a short poetic meditation on the wood of the cross.
The transition from Passiontide to Eastertide occurs at the Great Vigil and First Eucharist of Easter on Holy Saturday evening. Music is but one of the sensory aides in this rich and elaborate service - truly a Banquet Céleste - in which the somberness of Lent is supplanted by the joy of the Resurrection.
— David Henry
Holy Week traditionally opens with the great processional hymn, All Glory, Laud and Honor. This hymn has been associated with Palm Sunday since the eighth century, when its text was first written by St. Theodulph, the Bishop of Orléans. In Salisbury Cathedral in the late Middle Ages, each verse was sung in Sarum plainsong first by the choirboys, and then repeated by the congregation. Since the 16th century, the familiar melody by Melchior Teschner (1585-1635) has carried St. Theodulph's text, which in turn carries us back to Jerusalem to relive the entry of Christ into that city.
The Venetian composer Antonio Lotti (1667-1740) is best known for one composition, his eight-part setting of the Crucifixus etiam pro nobis from the Creed. Though written at the height of the Italian baroque, this piece, with its highly-charged dissonances and tensions, hearkens back to the style of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613).
On Maundy Thursday, with its Eucharistic focus, the music is drawn from the repertoire of France, a country with a long tradition of almost mystical devotion to the Eucharist. The music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) and Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) offers examples of this tradition as expressed in the 20th century. Le Banquet Céleste was Messiaen's first published work, begun in 1926 and completed in 1928. It is a profoundly introspective piece, inspired by the songs of birds as heard in the French village of Fuligny in the Aube, where the piece was composed. Duruflé's Ubi caritas and Tantum ergo are four-part choral meditations on the ancient Gregorian melodies which are intimately bound up with these well-known devotional texts. Duruflé's Mass setting Cum Jubilo is also based on plainsong, with its thematic material drawn from the beautiful and enduring melodies of Mass IX from the Liber Usualis.
On Good Friday, highly expressive texts are carried by music that spans many centuries. Whether plainsong or polyphony, the music conveys the sense of restraint that prevails throughout this service, the only day of the church year in which the Eucharist is not celebrated. The Reproaches of Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) were composed specifically for use during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday. They are taken from his Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae (Office of Holy Week) of 1585, one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance liturgical music, and one of the most extensive compilations of Holy Week music ever to be undertaken. Healey Willan's (1880-1968) setting of Faithful Cross was also composed for the Veneration of the Cross. Willan employs the technique of alternatim, long familiar to Western liturgies, in which plainsong and harmonized music are interleaved one with the other. The hymn Pange, lingua, gloriosi (text by Bishop Venantius Fortunatus [530-509]) is sung in plainsong, with each stanza followed by a harmonized responsory on the Crux fidelis, a short poetic meditation on the wood of the cross.
The transition from Passiontide to Eastertide occurs at the Great Vigil and First Eucharist of Easter on Holy Saturday evening. Music is but one of the sensory aides in this rich and elaborate service - truly a Banquet Céleste - in which the somberness of Lent is supplanted by the joy of the Resurrection.
