L'Homme armé (1450-1650) - Music of War and Peace -- The Boston Camerata - Joël Cohen (1986) [RE-UP]

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L'Homme armé (1450-1650) - Music of War and Peace -- The Boston Camerata - Joël Cohen (1986) [RE-UP]

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We grow weary of the strife and conflict of our own time, in our own lives. And we turn to the music of the distant past to find the serenity and repose that is so often missing in our present. The pure, triadic consonances of Renaissance music; the graceful interweaving of diatonic melodies, the simple, direct instrumental colors - these sounds offer us relief. They seem to speak of a time when men lived in harmony and peace.
Yet even the quickest glance at the history of those times will contradict that impression. The socio-political milieu of Titian and Botticelli, of Josquin and Monteverdi, was full of cruelty and injustice, of ambition and violent upheaval. Still, the spiritual world of those paintings and musical compositions only rarely recall the tempestuous politics, the rapacious governments and corrupt statesmanship of those centuries. The artists' inner world depended only in part on the flow of current events.
We do find serene and timeless beauty in much art and music of these periods. We also find restlessness, and an increasingly determined effort to portray the passions and struggles of the real world. Such was the dialectic of the evolving musical language during the late Renaissance and early Baroque.
The depiction of battle scenes and armed combat, for instance, became a well-defined genre during the mid-sixteenth century. Starting with Clement Jannequin's La bataille de Marignan (from which Andrea Gabrieli's Battaglia and Susato's Bataille of this recording both borrow musical motifs), there were many dozens of musical combats for voices, for instrumental ensembles, for solo players.
What kind of effect were these pictorial works supposed to produce? Our modern ears are now accustomed to later battle music, from the 1812 overture to the score for Star Wars. The sheer physical force of he modern symphony orchestra, when it sets out to do a battle number, has gotten us used to truly monstrous effects of massed sound. Our modern repertoire of war music may strike us as more imposing, more terrifying, than these early works.
In their own day, the madrigals and chansons of battle could and did arouse powerful emotions in their hearers; contemporary accounts leave no doubt on that score. The early depictions in music of combat are stylized - but they are not jokes.
In other ways, too, not just in the battle pieces, the harsh realities of conflict are present in these repertoires. Claude Goudimel, who sings of peace and brotherly love in this recording, was killed because he was a Protestant. The "captivity" of William Byrd's haunting motet refers to the plight of the persecuted English Catholics. Salamone Rossi's astonishing setting of the solemn Jewish prayer for the dead leaps over the high ghetto walls to the dancing rhythm of an Italian gagliarda. And the horrible events of the Thirty Years' War are frequently reflected in the texts chosen by Heinrich Schütz, who lived through that sorry time. When Schütz, at the war's end, composed Es ging ein Samann aus, Jesus' parable of the sower, he was probable celebrating the return of some hope for life after so many years of brutality.
Did the men and women of that age contemplate, as we do, the possible destruction of the human race? Their terror before the abyss was not unlike ours - Lassus' In hora ultima, like some medieval fresco on a church wall, paints a vivid picture of the Apocalypse.
A spirit of rebirth and renewal is nonetheless strong in the music of those troubled times. Our first impression of this music, that these composers were deeply rooted in eternal values, is after all a correct one. Such works, if we can recognise their message across the centuries, invite us to look beyond the sterile confrontations of our own day, and to seek out other, better alternatives to war and destruction. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!

JOEL COHEN