Underrated Classical Musicians 3/18/20

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;..."

Auden is now an old master himself, dead nearly fifty years, but when speaking of the era of Breughel, he could have been speaking just as well to the prescience of a musical master like Nicolas Gombert. There are, of course, so many reasons why religion makes particular sense in the season of death, and even as existence after death always remains a mystery, death always comes, and therefore humanity always returns to religion. For worse or better, we are hard wired to entertain notions of the sacred. 

Just like the first few lines of W.H. Auden's Musee des beaux arts could be written about today, the sacred text of Media vita could have been written about next week. 

"In the midst of life we be in death: Of whom may we seek for succour, but of Thee, O Lord, which for our sins justly art moved? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, Deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."

The art of the sacred was not created for moments when life is in its full flower. When life gives us no existential questions to answer, the better we listen to profane music about love and pleasure, and the great old music masters of the Church wrote plenty of music for those seasons of life too. But most of them reserved their true effort for those moments when living requires effort, for those moments when people need to work to find the meaning in their lives. 

There are very few if any composers from the era before Bach who are properly rated let alone overrated. The church music of the High Renaissance is an entire era of music that seems to have disappeared in the 18th century from public consumption in much the same way that what we now think of as classical music is disappearing from the pubic discourse. Like classical music, it speaks to an ethos completely alien to later eras, and yet the ethos was clearly no less meaningful. 

I could give a biography of Nicolas Gombert, it's pretty interesting as far as composer biographies go, but to assign an identity to this music would almost defeat the point of it. The very point of such music is its disembodied anonymity. I could talk of this composer's heavy lexicon of techniques and how they differ from his contemporaries and teacher (Josquin), but the point of such techniques is not to stand out but to blend these polyphonic voices into a seamless thread where it is impossible to look at or listen to the strand and determine where one voice or phrase begins and another ends. 

What's truly crucial about this music is not its composer but to whom the composer addresses the music. Is it us? Is it god? Is it both? Or is it false our vision of god? The greatness of music, the malleability of musical meaning beyond all the other art forms, lies within music's ability to make itself about anything within which the listener perceives the music. This is why the non-specificity of music, more so music than literature or even art, is where the religious experience most commonly resides. 

More transcendental speculations about early music on another day.3