"Have pity on Dufay as he sleeps," reads part of the text to Guilliame Dufay's "Ave regina coelorum," "lest he fall into the fire where sinners burn." In the fifteenth century, it was nothing unusual for a musician to compose an epitaph for one's self, and it was part of the job description for an expert composer to produce music in observance of the deaths of important dignitaries, noblemen fallen on the battlefields, conspicuous clerics, and others of note. In the course of this survey of early "death music," Gaudeamus' In Memoria: Medieval Songs of Remembrance,
the Clerks' Group, the superb English period vocal group led by
Edward Wickham, performs some musical memorials even written by one musician to another, such as Ockeghem's "Mort tu as navré" composed at the passing of
Gilles Binchois in 1460. Bookended by the standard Gregorian antiphon "Requiem aeternam," the melody of which drives the undercurrent in much of the music here,
Wickham and
the Clerks' Group give up the ghosts of musical works dealing with death and the dying. These range from an anonymous English Gloria/Credo pair utilizing the Requiem aeternam as a cantus firmus to an apprehensive and nervous anticipation of death; "Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?" written by Heinrich Isaac for Lorenzo de Medici, whose passing in 1492 heralded the end of the Florentine Renaissance.
One apparent attribute of this music is that not all of it is necessarily very mournful; it is in the main respectful, quiet and designed to express a wish for peace and repose to the departed rather than echo the suffering and lamentation of the living left behind. Of the 14 pieces included here, the program is rather heavily weighted toward Josquin Desprez, represented through four pieces. This may be because so many fifteenth century works are attributed to Josquin, and the authenticity of the four-part Pater noster/Ave maria presented here under Josquin's rubric has been contested in some circles.
Wickham does not address this matter in his notes; whether authentic or not, it is needed for illustration as Josquin requested in his will that his setting of the Pater noster/Ave maria annually be sung before his house. There is also some question as to whether "Cueurs desolez," a striking secular homage to Seigneur de Ville Jean de Luxembourg based on the Dies Irae, was composed by Pierre de la Rue as unequivocally stated here. Given the rather rough-hewn contrapuntal technique employed in the piece, which uses rare octave doublings between the tenor and alto parts, perhaps not, though two of the uncontested Josquin pieces, Absolve quaesumus (possibly written on the death of Jacob Obrecht) and Nymphes des bois, both stand out among the highlights of this collection.
The singing, pronunciation of the texts, and pacing of the music are all superbly done, as is
the Clerks' wont; the recording, made in the Chapel of St. Catherine's College at Cambridge, is generously spacious without swallowing up the music. There is one more minor complaint against the subhead; though this program is identified as "Medieval Songs of Remembrance," every one of these compositions save the chant incipits at the beginning and end of this disc belong to the early Renaissance.
Wickham, regarded as a major Renaissance specialist, cannot have made this decision, and one suspects that Sanctuary Classics must have decided that Medieval, with its association to Hildegard von Bingen and other hot topics, was more commercial word than Renaissance; a pity if so, as it is contextually misleading. Nevertheless, as the more somber-sounding fare is reserved for the second half of the collection, one may enjoy Gaudeamus' In Memoria: Medieval Songs of Remembrance without fear that listening to it a lot may result in one's becoming a morbid person.