A medieval celebration

An example of the use of the "Euouae" abbreviation from the Liber Usualis (from Wikipedia)

EUOUAE is a vocal ensemble with a repertoire whose primary focus is the Middle Ages, a time of considerable innovation and development in the practice, theory, and notation of Western music as we now know it.  Their name is an abbreviation encountered in many early music manuscripts where, for one reason or another, there was not enough room to write out the words "seculorum amen" below the notes to which these words were to be sung.  Director Steven Sven Olbash provided some introductory remarks, which included jokes about how the name of the ensemble should be pronounced;  but the simplest approach would seem to be to follow our predecessors and utter the words "seculorum amen" when we encounter this string of letters.

At last night's event in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church, EUOUAE offered a "musical reproduction" of the celebration of a mass to honor the Assumption of Mary.  The music for the mass ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) came from a fourteenth-century manuscript from Tournai, which may be the earliest polyphonic setting of all of these movements.  The current scholarly opinion is that the movements were not the product of a single composer.  However, the nature of the manuscript suggests that these movements would have been sung together as part of a single ritual.

Last night's performance provided a vivid reminder of just how far polyphony has come.  The music itself is in three voices, and Olbash chose to perform the text by having two groups of three singers alternate between successive verses.  Among the three voices there is almost no rhythmic independence.  The three performers sing pretty much as one, for the most part following the rhythms of plainchant;  each voice just happens to be singing a distinct set of notes.  Needless to say, there is no suggestion of harmony as we now know it;  and, as is the case in much counterpoint, particularly when it is first species (note-for-note), the emphasis is on each note having a suitable melodic line subject to a few constraints concerning which pitches are allowed to sound simultaneously.  The pitches themselves come from the modal scales and are thus differ decidedly from how they would sound when played on an equal-tempered keyboard;  but both my ear and my familiarity with this repertoire are not sufficiently refined to determine just how faithful the EUOUAE approach to intonation was.

Interleaved among the mass sections were other selections suitable for the sections of the ritual and appropriate to the theme of the Assumption.  Four of these selections, listed as "Gregorian chant," were taken from the 1974 edition of the Graduale Romanum in the section for the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary;  and, as the program notes made clear, this music probably differs significantly from any plainchant incorporated in rituals of fourteenth-century Tournai.  More "historically informed" was the inclusion of an Alleluia from the Magnus Liber, the primary source for much of the two-voice polyphony that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the celebrations at Notre Dame de Paris.  The Magnus Liber is attributed to Léonin, and the Alleluia was an example of his style of melismatic organum, in which one voice (tenor) sustains the pitches of a "source" plainchant while a second voice (duplum) sings long embellished passages on the single syllable of the sustained tone.  While male voices were used for the Mass ordinary, Olbash had both the plainchant and the organum performed by six women, four sopranos and two altos.  In the melismatic organum the tenor was sung by the two altos (Andrea Klein and Celeste Winant);  and two sopranos (Ann Moss and Toni D' Amelio) alternated in singing the associated melismata.

The evening concluded with a "great leap forward" to the fifteenth century and the far richer polyphony of Jacob Obrecht.  In keeping with the theme of the ritual, the entire ensemble sang his setting of the Marian Antiphon "Salve Regina."  Obrecht only composed music for alternating verses, under the assumption that they would be interleaved with verses sung as plainchant.  Olbash selected a nineteenth-century source for those chants for being appropriately consistent with Obrecht's style.

Taken as a whole, this was a noble undertaking, providing vivid examples of where our music originated and how it progressed in its earliest stages.  Needless to say, there was little "authenticity" in the celebration of the ritual;  but this was a performance of music, rather than an anthropological investigation into religious practices in the Middle Ages.  If I came away with any question, it concerned whether or not the singers were occasionally given to a level of expressiveness that was more suitable to the nineteenth century than the thirteenth.  Still, that expressiveness certainly indicated a commitment to the performances of this music;  and, while it may have been "historically" out of place, it was never disturbingly so.  As an exercise in translating scholarship into performance before an attentive audience, this effort was several levels higher than an admirable execution of good intentions.