A defining moment in Catholic life in early modern Europe, Holy Week brought together the faithful to commemorate the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this study of ritual and music, Robert L. Kendrick investigates the impact of the music used during the Paschal Triduum on European cultures during the mid-16th century, when devotional trends surrounding liturgical music were established; through the 17th century, which saw the diffusion of the repertory at the height of the Catholic Reformation; and finally into the early 18th century, when a change in aesthetics led to an eventual decline of its importance. By considering such issues as stylistic traditions, trends in scriptural exegesis, performance space, and customs of meditation and expression, Kendrick enables us to imagine the music in the places where it was performed.
A defining moment in Catholic life in early modern Europe, Holy Week brought together the faithful to commemorate the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this study of ritual and music, Robert L. Kendrick investigates the impact of the music used during the Paschal Triduum on European cultures during the mid-16th century, when devotional trends surrounding liturgical music were established; through the 17th century, which saw the diffusion of the repertory at the height of the Catholic Reformation; and finally into the early 18th century, when a change in aesthetics led to an eventual decline of its importance. By considering such issues as stylistic traditions, trends in scriptural exegesis, performance space, and customs of meditation and expression, Kendrick enables us to imagine the music in the places where it was performed.
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Overview
A defining moment in Catholic life in early modern Europe, Holy Week brought together the faithful to commemorate the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this study of ritual and music, Robert L. Kendrick investigates the impact of the music used during the Paschal Triduum on European cultures during the mid-16th century, when devotional trends surrounding liturgical music were established; through the 17th century, which saw the diffusion of the repertory at the height of the Catholic Reformation; and finally into the early 18th century, when a change in aesthetics led to an eventual decline of its importance. By considering such issues as stylistic traditions, trends in scriptural exegesis, performance space, and customs of meditation and expression, Kendrick enables us to imagine the music in the places where it was performed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253011626 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Music and the Early Modern Imagination |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Robert L. Kendrick is Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. He is author of Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Music in Early Modern Milan and The Sounds of Milan, 1585–1650.
Read an Excerpt
Singing Jeremiah
Music and Meaning in Holy Week
By Robert L. Kendrick
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Robert L. KendrickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01162-6
CHAPTER 1
Symbolic Meanings, Sonic Penance
In the ritual year of early modern Catholics, the days before Easter represented the longest single commemoration, collective and personal, of the central events of salvation. Despite the survival or re-invention of historical Holy Week traditions today, it is still hard to imagine how much prayer and penitence were packed into the seventy-odd hours between the afternoons of Wednesday and Saturday. The three central days—the Triduum—recalling the Passion included the chanted words, participatory rites, and sonic behavior of liturgical Maundy Thursday ("Feria V in Coena Domini," hereafter F5), Good Friday ("Feria VI in Parasceve," hereafter F6), and Holy Saturday ("Sabbato Sancto," hereafter SS). Beyond the structures of the Divine Office and Mass, there were community actions: processions, "entombments of Christ," depositions from the Cross, ceremonies of mourning and weeping, and, less appealingly, group violence. The social re-enactment of Christ's atonement went hand in hand with individual purging of sin via penance and often Confession. This dialectic between the audible expression of mourning and the internalization of remorse was vital for the Week's meaning.
Sounds simple and complex projected the listing of human guilt, the recollection of the Passion in narration and allegory, and the meanings of liturgical action. In order to focus on allegory and narrative voice, this study considers largely the most renowned music of these days, the polyphony and chant for the Canonical Hours of Matins followed by Lauds, in the two centuries after 1550. These were combined as a single service in Catholic continental Europe and its outposts. The Hours also drew lay participation, beyond the monks, nuns, or cathedral clergy who would have sung the texts.
From some point in the later Middle Ages onward, evidently first at the Papal court and then increasingly elsewhere, these services were in most places anticipated to occur in the late afternoon of the day preceding their liturgical assignment. Thus the texts of liturgical Thursday were read or sung on late Wednesday afternoon, and similarly Friday's Hours on Thursday and Saturday's on Friday, each day as the natural light in churches waned. This ambient darkening was echoed and enhanced by the extinguishing of church lights as the service went on. Because of this interaction, the Hours were known as the Office of Tenebrae: darkness/shadows.
Although the action and texts of the services were highly determined, they conveyed not only emotion but social meaning. To consider simply the written musical documents leaves out essential if irrecoverable elements: vocal/musical execution; the prescribed gestures and movement; and the behavior of participants. Before reducing sound to breviary prescriptions or written scores—in the case of Lauds' music, the level of improvised ornamentation suggests that much more was involved—we might take to heart Ernesto De Martino's critique of text-centered approaches to personal and collective threnodies for deceased family members in modern southern Italy. For De Martino, neglecting performance meant missing major aspects of the rituals of lamenting.
FORMS AND PRACTICE
The overall structure of Matins and Lauds was roughly similar across the wide variety of late medieval practice, but the actual texts could differ locally until about 1580. From roughly 1500 onward, the items of the Week's Office were sometimes gathered into a single Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae in manuscript or print, whose precise selections varied by time and place. Starting around 1560, printed editions of the music, often with the Gospel Passions for Mass included, were issued under this title as well (unless specified as text-only, such music editions are henceforth called "OHS").
One idealized account of the service when presided over by a bishop can be found in the 1600 Caeremoniale episcoporum, which also furnished an equally stereotypical image (fig. 1.1) in its attempt to standardize practice. Before Matins began, a triangular candelabrum, or "hearse," was set out with from nine up to seventy-two candles of common wax (depending on local tradition, although fifteen were typical even before 1600). Lights were lit on the stripped altar, only partially denuded on Wednesday, completely so the other days. As church bells were silenced during the Triduum until Vespers of Holy Saturday, the start of the Office was announced by the beating of wooden sticks. If a bishop were present, he would proceed to his throne, and all would then stand for the silent Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo. In the Caeremoniale's engraving, the hearse with fifteen candles is shown on the altar; the singers—choirboys and adult men—are clearly visible in the right foreground, and the perspective is from just behind them, rather as if the music were drawing the viewer into the ritual.
The texts sung at Matins consisted of three formally identical sections called Nocturnes, and each Nocturne started with three psalms (hereafter abbreviated as "P" plus consecutive number) with antiphons before and after each. This psalmodic group was followed by three readings or Lessons (Latin lectiones, here "L" plus consecutive number). The end of the opening three-psalm section was separated from the first reading by a versicle and another silent Pater Noster. The readings in the First Nocturne were verses from one or another of the five chapters of the Lamentations of Jeremiah (or Threni), normally sung to a repeating chant tone or recitation formula, which also often varied locally as late as 1600 (and beyond). Every Lamentations Lesson ended with a non-Scriptural refrain "Jersualem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum/Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God." The opening reading of each day had a title (usually set to music): for F5, "Incipit lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae," and for the other two, "De lamentatione Jeremiae prophetae." In most but not all places until 1600, the last reading of Nocturne I (L3) for SS used verses from chapter 5 of Lamentations, Jeremiah's Prayer, the Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae. Every Lesson was followed immediately by a Responsory (here "R" plus number), nine in all over the three Nocturnes of each day and thus twenty-seven over the course of the Triduum. Because of the days' extreme mourning, the Lesser Doxology ("Gloria Patri et Filio," normally ending psalms and canticles) was also omitted from liturgical Thursday to liturgical Saturday, and this helps identify musical settings meant for the Triduum as opposed to other occasions.
The following two Nocturnes repeated the structure with other psalms and Responsories, along with Lessons from other sources. The readings in these later Nocturnes were often taken from Augustine's sermons on the Psalms, and Paul's Epistles (Second and Third Nocturnes, respectively), while the variable literary voice and tone of the Responsories continued throughout Matins. After Matins ended with another silent Our Father, Lauds followed immediately, starting with three psalms and a canticle, then Psalm 148, Laudate Dominum de caelis. Although the other items changed on each day, the first two, Psalm 50, Miserere mei Deus, and 148 were invariable. After this psalmody, there followed the Gospel canticle, Zacharias's outpouring of joy at the upcoming births of Christ and John the Baptist (Lk 1:68–79), Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel (henceforth Benedictus, not to be confused with the Mass's Sanctus), with its Proper antiphon. Unless set to polyphony, all psalms and canticles were chanted to a simple tone antiphonally, and their antiphons sung chorally.
In the late afternoon, around the spring solstice, whatever natural light there was in any church was fading. Throughout the course of Matins and Lauds the hearse lights were extinguished with some kind of snuffer one by one, leaving only the top candle lit when the Benedictus was reached. In institutions with fifteen candles, each snuffing typically occurred at the repetitions of the antiphons after the fourteen psalms over the two Hours (in Spain, the snuffer was known as the "mano de Judas"). At v.7 of the canticle, "Ut sine timore," the altar candles and all other lights except for the last hearse candle were also put out, thus leaving the space with a minimum of artificial illumination. Then (in most places, at the repeat of the antiphon) the remaining candle was taken away from the sanctuary. Before 1570, this moment was often followed by a dialogue litany with short tropes, the "Kyrie tenebrarum," for which some sixteenth-century music survives. But after the arrival of the new liturgical books, the closing section of Lauds began with the verse "Christus factus est" (henceforth CFE), expanded with an additional phrase each successive day. By this point the remaining candle was to be hidden behind another altar, removing the last artificial light in the ritual space.
At the end of Lauds, the Miserere was repeated, louder or softer than the first time depending on local custom, followed by the Collect (prayer) "Respice, quaesumus, Domine." Finally, all those present—not simply the clergy singing the Office—made a loud noise, the strepitus, for some time with sticks or beaters, thus echoing the call to Matins. Lauds closed with the single remaining lit candle being returned to the hearse.
Given its various allegorical meanings—the earthquake while Christ was on the Cross, the dispersion of the Apostles, the flaying while at Pilate's palace—the strepitus had a key role in the symbolic dramaturgy of Holy Week. Its abolition was the first gesture of the Reformation in the southwest German town of Giengen in 1534. But in early modern Europe, it also provided an opportunity for the social expression of excess and violence. A host of prohibitions against its "disorder," issued by Italian diocesan synods from the early Cinquecento onward, testifies to frequent explosions of energy, as bishops attempted to regulate the duration of the banging and even the materials used therein. This "unruliness" was not limited to Renaissance Italy: a 1712 guide to Holy Week for the Austrian Netherlands warned against letting children use the moment as the catalyst for a game of "beating out Lent" with their rattles and mallets. One measure of the longevity of the strepitus, and its link to collective penance, in rural Catholic Europe is the practice of children smashing poles on the ground at the end of Tenebrae in the Val Tidone, southwest of Piacenza, with the pieces then used later to light the Easter candle, a tradition known as "beating sins" ("batt i pcä") recorded as late as the 1950s. Even today in Calabria, the wooden instruments used in Holy Week processions are called the "strumenti delle tenebre."
The injunctions against "overdoing" the moment attempted to limit congregational agency during Tenebrae, and they raise the wider question of how the laity could intervene in what was supposed to be a service for clergy or nuns. Over the entire sonic continuum, the strepitus represents the opposite of complex polyphony or chant heard early in Matins: unorganized, collective noise with no verbal content whatsoever, relieving the tension of the long and intense service, but also acting as a conduit for both social conflicts and devotional sentiment.
Since the ritual action was central to, but not directly emblematic of, community enactment of the Passion, a series of liturgical commentators provided both a narrative for the whole rite and meanings for its individual actions. Here Guglielmus Durandus's Rationale divinorum officium, the classic thirteenth-century interpretation of the texts and actions of the Office, proved long-lived; at least eleven Cinquecento printed editions survive. Still, his was not the only guide, as many copies of Johannes Beleth's medieval treatise of the same name have been preserved. Beleth's Rationale (or Summa) offered a more limited and sometimes more logical set of allegorical explanations for the Office as a whole, hence probably its popularity.
Such explications, which had begun with Amalarius of Metz in the ninth century, continued in early modern times, for instance the third treatise of Michele Timoteo's question-and-answer tract In divinum officium trecentum quaestiones (Venice, 1581). Timoteo borrowed liberally from past authors, while giving allegorical explanations for the peculiarities of the Triduum Office. A generation later, Bartolomeo Gavanti's Thesaurus sacrum rituum (1628) synthesized medieval comments on the liturgy in a relatively logical reading. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, liturgists at Pisa Cathedral would repeat and critique Durandus's symbolism of the Days—doing so as their chapelmaster Giovanni Maria Clari was composing modern-style Lessons for their Duomo.
One interpretive tradition considered Tenebrae in particular as being the "funeral of Christ," thus connected to the long-standing planctus or mourning piece; another considered the texts, especially the Lamentations readings, as a catalogue of human sin that had rendered the Passion necessary for salvation; and a third took it as an essentially moral and penitential experience of metanoia, turning away from sin, most evident in the Miserere. Durandus's interpretation of the Triduum Office is found in Book VI of the Rationale, and draws heavily on previous allegorical explanations. Like most writers before and after, he treated the Matins/Lauds of all three days as a single unit, before his accounts of other Triduum liturgy. Durandus considered the Hours to be an enactment of the Church celebrating the exequies of Christ, and the Office shadows not so much a symbol of the darkness during Christ's Crucifixion but rather the spiritual night in the faithful's hearts. His understanding of such "exequies" would last into modern times.
The bishop explained the "Jerusalem, convertere" refrain of the First Nocturne's Lessons as a call to Christian penance. He equated the three Nocturnes to the three states of humans—virgins, the married, and the chaste—whom Christ descended to Hell to redeem. Similarly, the psalms related to action, the Lessons to contemplation, and Responsories to angelic song; this abstract characterization strongly influenced early modern understandings. Durandus's conception of Jeremiah's words as funereal lament also raises issues of textual hermeneutics discussed below.
After allegorical explanations of the extinguished candles, the bishop gave three meanings for the return of the last one: the faithful Virgin, Christ's Resurrection, or the rebirth of faith in the hearts of the Apostles and the Church. He also noted a congregational cry at the Benedictus, symbolizing those present at the arrest of Christ, and considered the loud performance of the canticle as joy after the Antichrist would be killed. The "Kyrie" dialogue of Lauds represented the tumult among Christ's persecutors, and the tropes of this section stood for the laments of the three Marys at the Sepulchre. Finally, he took the strepitus to represent the terror of those facing Christ's captors, or the fear at the earthquake during the Crucifixion. The sheer noisiness—"vociferatio," "clangor canentium," "sonitus"—of Durandus's description of Lauds, not Matins, is noteworthy. His is not a single allegorical narrative but a multiplicity of possible meanings.
In early modern practice, the concrete actions outside the projection of the texts seem to have been limited to the movement of the clerics coming forward to chant the lessons or saying prayers silently, the snuffing of the lights, the hiding and return of the final candle, and the strepitus. The visual object of Triduum devotion in churches was normally some kind of representation of Christ's Tomb, the sepulcrum. In an environment in which many visual stimuli had been turned off, the projection of the texts took on a totalizing cast. Audiences could not help but pay attention to the words and whatever music went with them. Whether or not set to complex music, the Office texts display remarkable sacrality and canonicity, and their prominence was underscored by the conditions of their recitation: the altars and statues in the church draped, the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon, and even the dispensability of an officiating priest in female monastic houses.
LIGHT AND MEANING
For observers and participants then and now, these services have had their fascination, due to their interplay of music and light. Their anticipation to the preceding afternoon had transferred the idea of shadows to the growing gloaming around the services, which was reinforced by the extinguishing of the candles. Indeed, the Caeremoniale episcoporum directed that Lauds end late, as the sun went down ("ut officium perficiatur hora tarda, hoc est, sole occidente"). The ending of the Hours in darkness—underscored by the real dangers and cultural inversions of the early modern night—resonated with the last verse of the Benedictus, Zacharias's prophecy of his son's future role for sinful humanity: "Illuminare his, qui in tenebris et umbra mortis sedent"/"to illuminate those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death." The dark-bright duality was part of a larger system, resuming the Christmas cycle after Presentation BVM (2 February), and culminating in the Easter Vigil with the Paschal candle. With its allegorical meanings ranging from the shadows of the Crucifixion to those of human sin, Tenebrae was a social extinguishing of light, the music of which was increasingly important.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Singing Jeremiah by Robert L. Kendrick. Copyright © 2014 Robert L. Kendrick. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Terminology, Abbreviations, Texts
1. Symbolic Meanings, Sonic Penance
2. Textual Understandings, Musical Expressions
3. Devotion, Models, Circulation, 1550-1600
4. Dynastic Tenebrae
5. Static Rites, Dramatic Music
6. European Tenebrae c. 1680
7. Ad honorem Passionis: Triduum Music and Rational Piety
8. Endings and Continuities
Appendix: Tables 1-4
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
This is a path-breaking study in the field of sacred music from the 16th-18th centuries. No one other than Kendrick has delved so deeply into the relationship between sacred music; its function within the larger spiritual sphere of religious art; its relationship to changing attitudes toward spiritual experience and expression; and the manner in which those attitudes differ from one monastic order to another, or among various kinds of ecclesiastical institutions.
The great value of Kendrick's contribution is not only his magisterial command of the Holy Week repertory itself, but also his interest in examining the rite as would an anthropologist: the darkened setting in court, cathedral, or monastery; the variations in local practice; and the meaning of the rite and its texts for both the performers and the faithful participating in the service.
This is a path-breaking study in the field of sacred music from the 16th-18th centuries. No one other than Kendrick has delved so deeply into the relationship between sacred music; its function within the larger spiritual sphere of religious art; its relationship to changing attitudes toward spiritual experience and expression; and the manner in which those attitudes differ from one monastic order to another, or among various kinds of ecclesiastical institutions.
The great value of Kendrick's contribution is not only his magisterial command of the Holy Week repertory itself, but also his interest in examining the rite as would an anthropologist: the darkened setting in court, cathedral, or monastery; the variations in local practice; and the meaning of the rite and its texts for both the performers and the faithful participating in the service.