08 June 2019, 16:00
Oud-Katholieke Kerk - * * Amsterdam
15 June 2029, 16:00
Oud-Katholieke Kerk - Kinderhuissingel 76 Haarlem
Description
Nearly 50 l’homme armé masses were composed in two centuries by the most refined musicians of the renaissance era, between 1400 and 1600.
L’homme armé was a song composed probably around 1430. The origins and purpose of that song, which would serve as cantus firmus for many masterpieces to follow, are still not clear to the contemporary scholars. According to the latest research, it was probably composed as “marching song” for the Order of the Golden Fleece, a famous chivalric and crusading order instituted in 1430 by Philip the Good.
The song appeared for the first time in a polyphonic work in the three voices song Il sera par vous combatu –L’homme armé, probably composed by Guillame Du Fay. Du Fay himself and Ockeghem are the first to compose a mass based on l’homme armé cantus firmus. What is a cantus firmus? A cantus firmus (“fixed song”) is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition. L’homme armé became the base, the cantus firmus, of many masses composed after the ones of Ockeghem and Du Fay. As masses we mean the texts of the ordinarium missae. In the Roman Catholic liturgies, the ordinary of the mass refers to the part of the Eucharist that is reasonably constant without regard to the date on which the service is performed.
The last three decades of the 1400 appear now as the opening of the floodgates for the composition of masses based upon L’homme armé. The known composers of the first three layers of the tradition—Du Fay, Ockeghem, Regis, Caron, and Busnoys—were among the most prestigious names in music in the 1460s and 1470s, and the dissemination of their music continued well into the beginning of the 16th century. The spirit of emulation of those great masters, especially Busnoys, inspired composers as Josquin Desprez and his less known contemporary Pierre de la Rue to compose their version of the L’homme armé mass.
The tune itself, its intervals and its rhythm, allowed the composers to show off their technique in the counterpoint, creating complicated polyphonic textures using different kinds of canon techniques. One of this techniques is the canon mensuralis, a musical canon in which the voices proceed simultaneously with the same subject but at different speeds.
An example of the canon mensuralis technique can be heard in the Kyrie by Pierre de la Rue (two voices canon) and the second Agnus Dei by Josquin (three voices canon).
Not only the versatility of the L’homme armè tune made it a famous cantus firmus but also its symbolic features. The papacy clearly saw the symbolic potential of L’homme armé, the “armed man” (the crusader and/or Christ), both as a crusading symbol and as a symbol of the imperial power of the papacy. A witness to this is the large number of masses on L’homme armé that turn up relatively quickly in the manuscripts collected by or copied for the papal choir, as well as the considerable number of masses on L’homme armé written by composers in papal employment in the decades between 1480 and 1520.
This consolidated tradition is the base for the two masses composed by Palestrina on the subject of L’homme armé, one for 4 voices and one for 5 voices. Palestrina composed his L’homme armé masses around 1555 when the masses composed on that tune were going out of fashion but were still considered as an example of virtuoso counterpoint technique. It is probably in that spirit that Palestrina approached L’homme armé tradition following the steps of Josquin. Josquin’s mass, available in the papacy library because it was freshly recopied in the 1550, allowed Palestrina to measure himself against those masterpieces of counterpoint, to absorb their refined canon mensuralis technique and propose a version in the magnificent language of the late renaissance polyphonic Roman music. One of the best examples of his language can be found in the second Agnus Dei of his L’homme armé mass.