Performance: Skylark Ensemble, 2021
Text (Latin)
Heu me, Domine,
quia pecavi nimis in vita mea:
quid faciam miser, ubi fugiam,
nisi ad te, Deus meus?
Libera me, Domine,
de morte æterna,
in die illa tremenda,
quando celi mouendi
sunt et terra.
Text (English)
Alas, Lord,
for we have sinned too much in my life!
Poor wretch, what shall I do, where shall I flee,
but to you, my God?
Free me, Lord,
from eternal death
on the awful day;
when Heaven
and earth move.
About Heu Me Domine:
“Performances of Lusitano’s music were uncommon until recent years, and those prior to 2020 did not program a representative sample.
The aforementioned chromatic motet ‘Heu me domine’ was, essentially, the only piece of Lusitano’s heard in concerts, most likely because a modern transcription of the work became available in the 1970s. ‘Heu me domine’ is presented in Lusitano’s manuscript treatise, Tratado de canto de organo, as an etude demonstrating the challenges of performing multi-part polyphony that uses the chromatic genus. This harkens back to the subject of Lusitano and Vicentino’s dispute.
Tratado de canto de organo was known as an anonymous work until the 1960s, when Robert Stevenson identified Lusitano as the author, citing shared musical examples between the manuscript and Lusitano’s Introduttione facilissima as well as unusual Spanish spelling that indicate the author primarily spoke Portuguese.”
“The musical elements of this piece that make it original – that is, how would I recognize it if I heard it on the radio – first and foremost: (1) chromatic movement – the notes are usually only a half step away from each other – which is a bit unusual in a long series. Usually half steps are used to emphasize cadences and important notes, but to have a whole string of them in a row, especially in the Renaissance era, is quite striking. This makes it hard to tell if it’s “in a key” at first, and obscures whether it’s major or minor.
Other features: (2) as it is a motet from the Renaissance, I am not surprised to find that it is contrapuntal, meaning the voices enter all at different times and hardly ever sing the same words at the same time. (3) a mostly syllabic text setting – there’s usually only one pitch per syllable. (4) while the chromatic motion makes defining a key difficult, when I do hear a localized pitch center, it’s usually defined by contrary steps (ie: one voice up, one voice down – usually the lowest for this) and sometimes emphasized by a new voice entering. Finally, (5) upward movement seems to be employed to create tension, with downward movement to decrease tension.
FORM
I hear this piece as having three sections, with the middle section a bit like a dependent clause, depending on the last section. The text is in two parts, but I hear a fairly prominent cadence between de morte aeterna and in die illa tremenda, around 2:45 in the recording. The first section ends with the first stanza of text at around 1:50. None of the three primary cadences are on the same pitch level, but they all end on major triads.
The first section is defined by an ever upward feeling; as each voice enters it drives the pitch upward, and even with a small amount of downward motion (voices only have so much range after all), I get the sense of UP or LIFT for the whole section. This section is hard to tell if it is in major or minor: what local pitch centers there are don’t last long, there were a lot of what felt similar to cadential set-ups, but then got elided into further upward motion. Also, because the piece has just started, we don’t have any previous sections to use to inform our judgement. This section has the highest pitches in it, and all this helps underscore a text that describes ‘fleeing’ toward God. The end of the section is heralded by longer bass pitches that add some stability, and around 1:26 the upward motion is reversed and the section falls to a cadence about 1:50. The cadence uses the contrary step motion.
The second section starts with the new text stanza libera me, which even to me who doesn’t do Portugese Latin is pretty easy to pick out auditorily. This section has more low bass pitches that support the still-upward motion, so that the section doesn’t feel so UP, and the height of the section is not as pronounced as the first. I get the feeling of struggling toward freedom/heaven/God, and not necessarily succeeding. Even though local pitch centers fluctuate, there is more of a sense of being in minor in this section. The cadence at around 2:45 has a fifth motion in the bass line.
The primary reason I hear the second section as distinct from the third is because the motion changes. In the third section, the emphasis is on downward motion for the first time. This underlies text about the ‘awful day’ when heaven and earth move. I find it fitting that the downward motion leaves us to end on et terra, back on earth at the final cadence, underlining even more the failure of the struggle to flee in the first 2 sections. This section definitely feels like it is in minor, possibly because a descending chromatic bass-line is not uncommon in minor keys. While the final cadence does have contrary motion, the upward movement is not stepwise, and three voices step down, unlike many of the other cadential moments in the piece. (ok, I did look at the score for that part.)
So overall, this motet uses upward chromatic motion to create tension and a feeling of fleeing/flight, and then balances it with downward chromatic motion, leaving a feeling of failure in that struggle. The major triad at the end does imply some hope to me, but it’s also typical of the time, so I’m not sure.”
About Vicente Lusitano:
“Vicente Lusitano (ca. 1520 – ca. 1561) is arguably the most significant Portuguese composer of his time and, quite possibly, of all time. Most of the details of his life remain a mystery, and what little we do know has come down to us from 17th- and 18th-century sources examined in recent decades by Maria Augusta Barbosa (1977) and Robert Stevenson (1982). Lusitano was born in Olivença, Portugal, possibly to a Portuguese father and Angolan mother, and in several sources he is referred to as ‘brown’ or ‘mulatto’. His musical career is noteworthy for a number of reasons: he is the first documented Black composer in European music history; he held distinguished positions in Padova, Viterbo, Rome and, after converting to Protestantism, in Stuttgart; his collection of motets Liber Primus Epigramatum (1551) is the first anthology of music by a Portuguese composer published outside Portugal; equally distinguished is his treatise Introduttione facilissima, et novissima, di canto fermo, figurato, contraponto semplice, published in Rome in 1553, with subsequent reprints in Venice (1561) and Lisbon (1603); some of his music survives in manuscripts scattered across Spain, France and Germany, in choir books associated with important chapels collating works by many of Lusitano’s celebrated contemporaries, a fact that is itself testament to the scale of his reputation; among these works is the motet Heu me Domine which is, in the opinion of many scholars, the most difficult work to execute of the entire 16th-century repertoire. Despite all this, today his music remains largely unknown, and the majority of it is yet to be recorded.
Today, Vicente Lusitano is known primarily for debating the celebrated composer and theorist Nicolà Vicentino in a famous theoretical dispute held in Rome in 1551. The debate, centring on differences of opinion regarding the tuning of certain intervals requiring a level of nuance that challenges the limits of human perception, was arbitrated by the singers of the Papal choir (a special jury of sorts to resolve matters of music theory), and eventually victory was awarded to Lusitano. Perhaps for this reason, Lusitano has long had a reputation as a music theorist, and indeed musicological studies from the last 40 years have tended to concentrate on the content of his treatises rather than his music. What is certain, however, is that his music is sublime, characterised by melodies of impeccable shape and prosody, forming a dense polyphony of great expressivity that almost pre-empts the mannerisms of future generations of composers. The collection Liber Primus Epigramatum contains 23 motets, the majority of which are settings of texts for antiphons and responsories taken from the Office of Vespers. However, their musical treatment sets them apart from music traditionally written for such occasions, making it hard to envisage them fulfilling a liturgical function. More probably, these motets exist within the universe of musica reservata (also sometimes called musica secreta), an elite practice that flourished in Italy and the south of Germany during the second half of the 16th century. This was a performative musical style presenting a refined and emotionally intense setting of a text sung by a small group of musicians in front of an exclusive, learned audience who, after the performance, would engage in a sophisticated debate about the poetic attributes of the musical composition. The use of the term ‘epigram’ in the title of the collection seems to confirm that we are dealing with compositions of a poetic– hermeneutic nature focussing on the semantics of each individual text, works that were probably destined for the spiritual contemplation of Lusitano’s patrons in their private chapels. This practice – both aural and spiritual – was explored in considerable depth at so-called Accademie Filarmoniche in northern and central Italy in the mid 16th century. Some of these academies exist to this day, and their archives and musical collections attest to the common practice of combining voices and instruments (particularly recorders) in the performance of repertoire similar to Lusitano’s motets. In line with this model, we propose an interpretation featuring one singer per part accompanied by a consort of recorders, exact copies of Venetian instruments dating from ca. 1550 and whose use is documented at academies in Vienna and Verona.”
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