Composing imitative counterpoint around a cantus firmus: Two motets by Heinrich Isaac

Journal of Musicology

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 231-288

  Cumming, Julie E ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Alma redemptoris mater; Compositional process; Heinrich Isaac; Inviolata integra et casta es Maria; Module; Renaissance counterpoint

Indexed keywords

EID: 80054118087     PISSN: 02779269     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jm.2011.28.3.231     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Peter N. Schubert, "Hidden Forms in Palestrina's First Book of Four-Voice Motets," Journal of the American Musicological Society 60 (2007): 483-556 at 489-90, n. 16. (A corrected version of the appendix to this article is found on http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~schubert.)
2. For recent articles that look at cantus firmus and imitation in some other works by Isaac, see the issue on Heinrich Isaac, ed. Ulrich Tadday, Musik-Konzepte, Neue Folge 148/149 (2010): esp. Thomas Schmidt-Beste, "Stil und Struktur in den Tenormotetten Heinrich Isaacs," 65-88;
3. Andreas Pfisterer, "Imitationstechniken bei Isaac," 89-103
4. and Katelijne Schiltz, "'Aus einem Hauptgedanken alles Weitere entwickeln!': Die Kanons in Isaacs Choralis Constantinus II," 120-34.
5. For a modern edition, see Der Kodex des Magister Nicolaus Leopold, Staatsbibliothek München Mus. Ms. 3154, ed. Thomas L. Noblitt, Das Erbe deutscher Musik 80 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), no. 54, 257-65.
6. In his critical report, Noblitt posits a dating of 1476 for the motet, based on the watermark for most of fascicle 7 in which the motet is found, although there is no watermark on fol. 74; see Noblitt, Der Kodex des Magister Nicolaus Leopold, part 4, Das Erbe deutscher Musik 83 (1996): 321 and 344.
7. Joshua Rifkin also discusses the dating of this piece in "Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: Dating Josquin's 'Ave Maria... virgo serena'," Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 239-350, at 296 (fig. 5, which is a facsimile of fol. 74v), 300, 301, n. 124, 304-5, 305, n. 133, 313, n. 156.
8. He places it in the mid-1480s and seems to agree with Reinhard Strohm in associating it (along with two other pieces by Isaac in the same fascicle, Argentum et aurum and Ecce sacerdos magnus) with Isaac's stay at Innsbruck in 1484. See Reinhard Strohm, "Heinrich Isaac und die Musik in Deutschland vor 1492," in Heinrich Isaac und Paul Hofheimer im Umfeld von Kaiser Maximilian I, ed. Walter Salmen (Innsbruck: Edition Helbling, 1997), 21-41 at 29 and 33, n. 42.
9. For a discussion of the other source, Motetti a cinque, see Stanley Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), no. 46, 696-701.
10. Martin Just, "Heinrich Isaacs Motetten in italienischen Quellen," Analecta musicologica 1 (1963): 1-19; the handwritten score is included on seven unnumbered pages between 16 and 17, and there is a useful discussion of the piece on pp. 15-17. Just suggests that the piece was composed while Isaac worked in Florence, between 1484 and 1494-96 (p. 4)
11. Canonic cantus firmi became standard in Josquin's later five- and six-voice motets and chansons; see John Milsom, "Motets for Five or More Voices," 281-320, esp. 284-85, 288-89, 300
12. and Lawrence Bernstein, "Chansons for Five and Six Voices," 393-422, in The Josquin Companion, ed. Richard Sherr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
13. In my book The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 266-70
14. I called the kind of motet in which the chant remains in a single voice throughout and all voices have the text of the chant cantus firmus a "chant-paraphrase motet." Whereas mid-fifteenth-century chant-paraphrase motets normally put the chant in the top voice, later in the century it becomes more and more common to put the chant in the tenor voice, after the fashion of the tenor motet (see Cumming, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay, 270-78).
15. It is also common in chant-paraphrase motets to have imitation between the superius and tenor, as we see in Alma redemptoris mater at the beginnings of both partes. This usage of "chant paraphrase" is different from the "chant-paraphrase Mass," such as Josquin's Missa Pange lingua, in which each phrase of the chant is used as the soggetto for a point of imitation, but the chant is not found complete in any one voice. Because of this possible confusion, I would now call this kind of motet a "chant cantus-firmus motet" (in contrast to the tenor motet, in which the text of the cantus firmus is different from that of the other voices).
16. Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 10, "Henricus Isaac," 258-90, at 268. The setting is found in an autograph that is bound into Berlin 40021, created sometime before 1498.
17. The term comes from Jessie Ann Owens, "The Milan Partbooks: Evidence of Cipriano de Rore's Compositional Process," Journal of the American Musicological Society 37 (1984): 284;
18. see also her Composers at Work, 251. The concept of the module was developed fully by Schubert in "Hidden Forms."
19. These are described in Peter Schubert, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style (2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also notes 31-32, 34, and 37-38.
20. For another study and reconstruction of a motet from Motetti a cinque, see Theodor Dumitrescu, "Reconstructing and Repositioning Regis's Ave Maria... virgo serena," Early Music 37 (2009): 73-88.
21. On ic12, see Schubert, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style, 177-85.
22. The term "modus tenoris" comes from Guilielmus Monachus. In his The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, Bernhard Meier assigned the terms "clausula cantizans," "clausula tenorizans," "clausula basizans," and "clausula altizans" to the voices according to their function at the cadence (The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, trans. Ellen S. Beebe [rev. ed. New York: Broude Brothers, 1988], 90-101).
23. He does not identify the origin of his terms. According to Eggebrecht's Handwörterbuch, these terms first appear only in the eighteenth century, in the treatise of Johann Walter (1732) (see Siegfried Schmalzriedt, with Elke Mahlert and Bernd Sunten, "Kadenz," in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht [Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1974], 8).
24. Guilielmus Monachus created perfectly good terms for the same voice functions ca. 1480: modus suprani, modus tenoris, and modus contrae (i.e., contratenor bassus). I advocate using Monachus's terms, at least for music ca. 1500. See Guilielmus Monachus, De preceptis artis musicae, ed. Albert Seay (American Institute of Musicology, 1965), 41-42;
25. ed. and trans. in Eulmee Park, "'De preceptis artis musicae' of Guilielmus Monachus: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary" (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1993), sentences 53-63; 69-71 (Latin); 188-91 (English).
26. See Schubert, "Hidden Forms" and Modal Counterpoint. I have also devised additional terminology for late fifteenth-century music, which is detailed in Julie E. Cumming, "Text Setting and Imitative Technique in Petrucci's First Five Motet Prints," in The Motet around 1500: On the Relationship of Imitation and Text Treatment, ed. Thomas Schmidt-Beste (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011; in press), 63-90.
27. See Schubert, "Hidden Forms," 514;
28. and Cumming, "Text Setting and Imitative Technique," 78-82.
29. Schubert calls such repeated modules "repeated blocks" (see his "A Lesson from Lassus: Form in the Duos of 1577," Music Theory Spectrum 17 [1995]: 13) and refers to them as a kind of "harmonic sequence" because the intervals between the voices within the module or block remain the same. He finds that modular sequence is especially common at the ends of the two-voice ricercars. I also call modular repetition involving four voices "NIm-4"; on NIms, see note 29 below.
30. See Schubert, Modal Counterpoint, 195-98, 256-57
31. On stretto fuga in two voices, see John Milsom, "'Imitatio,' 'Intertextuality,' and Early Music," in Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 146-51.
32. For stretto fuga for more than two voices, see idem, "From Improvisation to Composition: Three Case Studies," in the eleventh publication of the Collected Writings of the Orpheus Instituut (Leuven: Leuven University Press, forthcoming).
33. For an even fuller discussion of the use of stretto fuga in the second half of the fifteenth century, see Julie Cumming and Peter Schubert, "Patterns of Imitation, 1450-1508," presented at a conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1 July 2009; and at a meeting of the American Musicological Society, Philadelphia, 13 November 2009.
34. See Schubert and Cumming, "Chant-Paraphrase Canon: Straitjacket or Instinctive Behaviour?" presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Barcelona, 6 July 2011. For a good example of the use of chant paraphrase in stretto fuga
35. On fauxbourdon, see Brian Trowell, "Faburden and Fauxbourdon," Musica disciplina 13 (1959): 43-78;
36. Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 200-10;
37. See also Klaus-Jürgen Sachs, Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zum Terminus, zur Lehre und zu den Quellen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1974), 137-38;
38. and Markus Jans, "Alle gegen eine: Satzmodelle in Note-gegen-Note-Sätzen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts," Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 10 (1986): 101-20.
39. Gaffurius, Practica musice (Milan, 1496), Book IV, chap. 12;
40. English trans. Clement A. Miller in Gaffurius, Practica musicae (American Institute of Musicology, 1968), 144-45
41. This is typical of music ca. 1500; see my article "From Variety to Repetition: The Birth of Imitative Polyphony," in Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 6, ed. Bruno Bouckaert, Eugeen Schreurs, and Ivan Asselman (Peer, Belgium: Alamire, 2008), 21-44, http://alamirefoundation.org/en/papers/yearbook- 6.
42. Schubert, "Hidden Forms," 489-90, n. 16.
43. On repetition, see Cumming, "From Variety to Repetition,"
44. and Jesse Rodin, "'When in Rome... ': What Josquin Learned in the Sistine Chapel," Journal of the American Musicological Society 61 (2008): 307-72.
45. For another look at compositional processes in the fifteenth century, see Cumming, "From Two-Part Framework to Movable Module," forthcoming.
46. For O decus, see Der Mensuralkodex des Nikolaus Apel (Ms. 1494 der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig), ed. Rudolf Gerber, Ludwig Finscher, and Wolfgang Dömling, Das Erbe deutscher Musik 33 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1956-75), 2:155-62.
47. For La morra, see One Hundred Songs of Harmonic Music, Ottaviano Petrucci, 1501, A Quincentenary Performing Edition, ed. David Fallows (Shirley, MA: Amherst Early Music, 2001), 88-89.
48. Katelijne Schiltz lists all the cantus-firmus canons in the Choralis Constantinus, vol. 2 in "'Aus einem Hauptgedanken'";
49. and Schubert and Cumming, "Chant-Paraphrase Canon."
50. In the introduction to his Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20, Robert O. Gjerdingen makes the following comment about the act of naming musical procedures. "It is, of course, possible to have musical knowledge that does not correspond to a name. The musical knowledge of ordinary listeners is of that type. But just as one can hardly imagine a serious inquiry into the characteristics and habits of different species of birds without using the names of birds, so it would be difficult to compare and contrast the species of galant musical phrases without the ability to name them." The same could be said about Renaissance music.