Ockeghem: Missa Cuiusvis Toni
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CD Details
Composer: Johannes OckeghemEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Import
CD Release Date: 2008-05-13
Music Label: Aeon
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Kyrie
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Gloria
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Credo
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Sanctus
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Agnus Dei
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Kyrie
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Gloria
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Credo
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Sanctus
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Agnus Dei
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Kyrie
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Gloria
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Credo
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Sanctus
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Agnus Dei
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Kyrie
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Gloria
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Credo
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Sanctus
- Missa cuiusvis toni: Agnus Dei
- Intemerata Dei mater
Music reviews of Ockeghem: Missa Cuiusvis Toni
Music Review: You Really Need to Trust Me Here ...
Rating: 5 Stars
... because I'm urging you to get, by hook crook or cash down, an expensive pair of CDs on which the same music, a polyphonic mass by Johannes Ockeghem (1420-1497), is performed four times. That's right, the same mass! Missa Cuiusvis Toni, which translates as "Mass in Any Mode". But Ockeghem is no ordinary polyphonist; he's the Newton or Darwin of polyphony, one of the foundational composers of European music. And this is no ordinary mass; it's a mathematical cathedral. Just as a great gothic cathedral welters in complexities, spires and arches and sculpture in every nook, yet astounds the visiter with its unity of grandeur, that's the effect of this music. And once you grasp the intricacy of its structure, you'll surely doubt that it's really possible; it's as if Ockeghem had played musical chess with four mainframe computers and won all four games.
The four "tones" or "modes" in this musical vocabulary are derived from the practices of liturgical chant. It will be easiest for a novice in polyphony to understand them by going to a piano or any instrument and playing them as simple scales, but without using the 'black' keys. Play from D to d. That's the protus tone. E to e is the deuterus. F to f is tritus, and G to g is tetradus. As with modern 'major' and 'minor' scales, the difference is in the placement of the half steps. But wait, it's not quite so simple, specially when you introduce the issues of consonance and dissonance implicit in all polyphony. One of the rewards you'll get from buying these CDs is that the notes include an ample and intelligible explanation of matters like modality, solmisation, and the ever-tricky 'ficta,' the flats and sharps that must be inserted in the modal procession of notes.
Ockeghem's Missa Cuiusvis Toni places the all the notes on the usual lines and spaces of the musical staff, but it omits the 'clef' sign, meaning that the 'final' note can be interpreted as D, E, F, or G. You WILL be astonished at what results from that simple choice: music of profoundly different emotional color, or affect. Ockeghem was a theologian in music, a thinker of the rationality of Aquinas as well as the mysticism of Eckhart. The order-in-intricacy of this music is essentially an assessment of the Order of the Universe, the Ptolmaic universe with its nested spheres.
The fact that it's gloriously beautiful wasn't irrelevant to Ockeghem, either. Earthly beauty reflected Divine beauty in his view. For a listener like me, who has rejected the theology that Ockeghem cherished, it's the beauty of the music that survives, but I think my perception of such beauty is Spinozan. In Ockeghem's mastery of musical "number," I hear the intricacy of physical reality, from quantum to galaxy. So it's in fact the "music of the spheres" after all.
Ensemble Musica Nova performs the four versions of Ockeghem's missa two-on-a-part, with women singing the discantus. They do it deliciously -- fine balance of voices, faultless ensemble, faultless tuning even of the crunchy dissonances, and superb linear independence of their four polyphonic voices. They've also managed what few editors and fewer performers have done; that is, they've grappled with the diverse modes and persuasively solved the enigmas. Even if you have the recording of this mass in the 'phrygian' mode of E by The Clerks' Group, or the performance by Capella Alamire, also only in the E mode, you will be astounded by Ensemble Musica Nova's accomplishment, both as singers and as musicologists.
Description of Ockeghem: Missa Cuiusvis Toni
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