The Tallis Scholars

Palestrina is one of a very small number of composers who have come to represent, as Peter Phillips says, “an entire epoch of music.” In terms of sheer influence on subsequent generations, few can compare. This, the 500th anniversary of his birth, affords an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary legacy, as well as compare his work with that of Renaissance contemporaries, in this case the near-equally titanic Orlande de Lassus.

The first half of this evening’s concert is devoted to one of Palestrina’s 107 settings of the ordinary texts of the mass. The Missa Ut re mi fa sol la is named for its principal melodic idea: the six notes of the hexachord, the compass and starting point of Renaissance music theory (almost identical with the modern equivalent, though substituting “Ut” for our “Do”!). As the building block of a mass setting, six ascending scale notes is an idea almost banal in its simplicity. Even more so, one would think, in the method of deployment here: with the second soprano part simply running up and down the scale at various speeds. As may be expected, however, Palestrina turns it into something considerably more.

In doing so, he was himself participating in a tradition. “Hexachord” masses were not new; Antoine Brumel had written one in the generation before, with his Agnus Dei a likely model for Palestrina’s structure here. Juan de Esquivel did a similar thing, as had contemporaries Morales and Capillas, while the great Josquin had also based a mass setting on scale tones, albeit in a different order, in the Missa La sol fa re mi. The popularity lay in the challenge: how to transform such simple material into a polyphonically satisfying sequence of movements?

The Kyrie introduces the principal idea: the second soprano treating the scale as a cantus firmus, simply ascending and descending once, while the other parts weave polyphony around it. In the following Christe, it does the same thing, twice as slowly (in “augmentation”). It will later spend the entire Gloria simply ascending and descending the ladder (an exercise for Palestrina’s young boy singers to learn their scales, perhaps?).

The texture is not unvarying: the Sanctus includes a particularly delightful section for the divided upper voices. And it wouldn’t be Palestrina without an imitative canon (in which one voice follows another exactly); once we get to the culminating Agnus Dei movement, he adds a further voice-part, in exact canon with the second soprano.

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Laudate pueri Dominum’s confident opening motif presages the deployment of that most opulent Renaissance resource, the eight-part choir. This motet, with singers likely doubled on instruments or organ, and arrayed with Palestrina’s customary mastery of polyphonic textures, would have crowned a high festival of the Roman Church.

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Orlande de Lassus enjoyed a position among Renaissance composers almost equal to that of Palestrina. He was likewise capable of a smoothly imitative polyphony, but, somewhat more involved in courtly music-making than the largely church-bound Palestrina, enjoyed a slightly greater freedom to experiment with form and harmony. Media vita takes as its subject the plainchant of the popular medieval text, a reminder of the impermanence of life and the omnipresence of death. Each voice-part enters with the outline of the opening of the chant. Subsequently the composer’s personality begins to assert itself: as in the quirky profile of the “quem quaerimus” line, with its ascending scale followed by a sudden descent. In the second part, a particularly expressive soprano part descends gradually from a high F, in a stylized gesture of lament.

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Palestrina’s Tribulationes civitatum is also from the Church’s penitential season. The composer moves seamlessly between imitative polyphony, gradually built up by introducing the voices one by one, and the homophonic declamatory style. The joins are barely noticeable, only interrupting the flow of the motet to highlight the word “timor” (fear). Both parts of the piece seem to lead inexorably to the cry of “miserere”—“have mercy.”

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Lassus, though well-schooled in the polyphonic techniques of his time, often pushed the boundaries of what was considered harmonically acceptable. He was associated with a musical movement that sought to enlarge the expressive power of music with unusual shifts of chromaticism or rhythm. Timor et tremor exemplifies this approach. This penitential motet opens with slow-moving chords that shift uncertainly between harmonic centers. Later, at the words “non confundar,” the “confusion” finds its echo in syncopated vocal parts that collide and clash with each other, in a manner more reminiscent of a secular madrigal than a sacred motet.

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The text of the motet Tu es Petrus is of especial importance to Rome, the seat of the Catholic Church, which derives its authority from the lineage of St. Peter, the first Pope. (In the scriptures, Christ anoints Peter as the “rock” upon which he will build His church.) As a Roman composer, Palestrina was called on to write multiple settings of this key passage. Tonight, we hear the version in six parts—a taut and masterly setting, sufficiently popular during the composer’s own age that he wrote an entire mass setting based upon it. Everything works to underscore the confidence and charisma of the Counter-Reformation Catholic church; high and low voices alternate and then cohere in rock-solid homophony, only to break into joyous melisma, an awe-inspiring testament to the skill of this most important of composers.
—James M. Potter, © 2025