Without exaggerating, one could call polyphony a kind of science fiction avant-la-lettre that was able to capture impossible-to-grasp theological and mystical concepts in embodied sound representations. Incarnation in polyphony means that the unimaginable suddenly becomes anchored in our senses and becomes comprehensible. What seems abstract and conceptual in the religious texts of the motets in this programme is given physical substance by the composers. The polyphonic language, which peaked in the 16th century, was a rhetoric of the impossible, a climatology ‘beyond the natural order of things’, as the opening line reads of Josquin’s fabulous motet Praeter rerum seriem that stands midway between polyphonic monster and machine. The philosopher Nicole Oresme saw the speculative capacity of polyphony as early as the 14th century: for him, it was a field of experimentation secundum imaginationem, that is, it had the potential to make the incomprehensible amenable.
Polyphonists’ favourite texts often dealt with counter-natural creation (such as the Incarnation) and other paradoxical processes of becoming for which no explanations could be found. Avant-garde polyphony went hand in hand with making suggestible what is beyond any imagination. The last two works (on the same text: Vox in Rama, Rachel mourning her dead children) serve as epilogue and counterpoint: as unimaginable as the theological creatio ex nihilo, metaphor for artistic creativity, modernity begins by making unimaginable destruction and catastrophe imaginable (as in De Wert’s chromatics) and art can no longer be detached from the dialectic of creation and destruction.
Graindelavoix – Björn Schmelzer
with Teodora Tommasi, Florencia Menconi, Andrew Hallock, Albert Riera, André Pérez Muíño, Marius Peterson, Tomàs Maxé, Arnout Malfliet
*Programa
Praeter rerum seriem, Josquin Desprez, a6
Sanctus, Missa Praeter rerum seriem, Georges De la Hèle, a6
Agnus Dei, Missa Praeter rerum seriem, Georges De la Hèle, a7/8
O admirabile commercium, Josquin Desprez, a4
Quando natus es, Josquin Desprez, a4
Ecce Maria genuit, Josquin Desprez, a4
O virgo virginum, Anonymous (follower of Josquin), a6
Salve Regina, Jacob Obrecht, a6
Vox in Rama, Bernardino de Ribera, a7
Vox in Rama, Giaches de Wert, a5
