Last night Clerestory, the Bay area’s acclaimed ten-man vocal ensemble, concluded its first season offering, The Cathedral and the Lady, with a reduced version of the program for a “guest appearance” at the Humanities West symposium, The Soul of Medieval Paris, at Herbst Theatre. As I observed in my preview piece, the full program was conceived as a musical tribute to Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, spanning the history of Western music from the early polyphony of Pérotin to the influence of those origins on Arvo Pärt. The abbreviated program provided an excellent account of this historical perspective and an equally excellent supplement to a highly informative (as well as entertaining) lecture on the cathedral itself, given by Columbia University Professor Stephen Murray.
Murray’s talk was a pointed critique of the concept of manifest destiny, the tempting thesis that both the building of Notre Dame and its place in the history of Western Europe were all part of the logical unfolding of some grand plan. Murray’s basic point was that preoccupation with such a plan tends to distract from more straightforward accounts of why things happen they way they do. This is as applicable to music history as it is to any other historical aspect. Where music is concerned, we are often tempted by the concept of grand design, because we focus on the artifacts of musical practice, rather than the practice itself. Clearly our understanding of ancient practices is limited, but it is disconcerting how few scholars try to mine what they can from those records of practice that are available to us.
Nevertheless, the advance of time through history still matters. We understand the emergence of polyphony at Notre Dame because it arose centuries after traditions of singing plainchant had been established. We understand the origins of the mensural notation of music as an advance from descriptive neumes, serving primarily as memory aids, to an explicitly prescriptive representation of duration, required to coordinate multiple voices singing different parts at the same time.
From this point of view, both the Clerestory selections and their ordering did little to honor that advance of history. A little bit of sorting out with regard to chronological ordering would have been helpful; and, while a selection of four secular motets contributed to representing the work of three of the composers on the program, they were stylistically out of place in an account of the relations between music and sacred rites. In addition the radical leap between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, giving the impression that nothing of value happened between these two eras, was more than a little disorienting.
Nevertheless, I can appreciate why the program was arranged as it was. The fact is that the earliest music is also the most alien to most music lovers. Pérotin’s “Viderunt Omnes” may have been the earliest work on the program; and, where any consideration of polyphony is concerned, it deserves to be called the most significant. However, most of the audience was probably not prepared to be thrust immediately into a prolonged melismatic organum, in which two independent vocal lines weave their respective ways around the tones of a plainchant, sustained long beyond the breath capacity of most humans. Thus, Clerestory prepared the way with more familiar “choral” sounds from Guillaume de Machaut, Johannes Ockeghem, and Gilles Binchois, along with a far less challenging song-and-refrain setting by Pérotin. Even with that preparation, however, it takes a bit to get used to “Viderunt Omnes;” but the effort is well rewarded.
Overall, the execution of the selections on the program was a bit uneven. “Viderunt Omnes” was definitely the high point of the evening. Bearing in mind that this music was never intended to be performed before an audience, Clerestory provided an account to draw the audience into Pérotin’s intricacies, delivered with a clarity that well served all of the inventiveness in detail. At the other chronological extreme, they performed the more recent selections by Francis Poulenc, Maurice Duruflé, and Pierre Villette with a well-polished blend of the multiple parts. Where delivery seemed less certain was in the “middle ground” of the program, covering the ars antiqua and ars nova periods leading up to the Renaissance. Taken as a whole, however, the program was imaginative, informative, and, for the most part, compelling.
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