Antique music

From the sacred to the profane, the Schola Antigua of Chicago took us on a journey last Friday at the Indianapolis Art Center, from the austere, religious Medieval-period plainsong to the lusty songs of King Henry VIII in the early Renaissance — the third of the Festival Music Society’s six early music programs.

Consisting of eight male singers directed by Calvin M. Bower, the Schola Antigua began, in unison, with a 14th century plainsong from a manuscript found only at Chicago’s Newberry Library, entitled “Quam pulchra es.” Its rareness, of greatest interest to music historians, doesn’t necessarily translate to a heightened musical enjoyment. A single chanted line sounds, of course, solemn and “religious” — by our exposure to Roman Catholicism’s Gregorian chants, from an even earlier period. We are forever biased, however, by the evolution — unique to Western music — of modal polyphony, in turn evolving to tonal harmony. A single line just doesn’t do it for me, no matter how well sung, and all the Schola’s singing emerged as stylishly excellent — even beautiful when we had more than one line going.

We got the latter from a setting of “Ave verum corpus” (“Hail true body”): two-line polyphony (i.e. music with more than one concurrent line or “voice”) from another Newberry manuscript dating from about 1300. Four singers were featured, creating lovely, open, uncluttered harmonies in stark contrast to the super-thick, indiscernible chords of present-day compositional technique. But this setting pales against Mozart’s late choral/orchestral setting of “Ave verum” nearly half a millennium later — a 46-measure piece at the apex of our Western civilization’s music.

As our singers moved forward in time, the religious music they sang became richer, perhaps reaching a summit in John Dunstaple’s three-part setting of the earlier-sung “Quam pulchra es,” this from the early 15th century.

Following intermission, it was all secular, the Schola first featuring French love songs of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as Guillaume de Machaut’s single-line “Foy porter” (“I want to stay faithful”). From then on, we heard only polyphony, getting up to a luscious four parts in Guillaume Dufay’s “Se la face ay pale” (“If my face be pale”), the program’s secular summit.

The Schola Antigua ended with songs from the court of Henry VIII, some of the writing of which can be credited to King Hal himself. The most bawdy of these, mild by later Elizabethan standards (Queen Elizabeth I was Henry’s second surviving daughter), was the concluding “Hey trolly lolly lo.” In its lyrics, cow was then pronounced “coo.” We have a young farm suitor trying to put the make on a farm lass, who continually keeps him at bay with, “I have to milk my coo.” Suggestive in itself?