Love, Revelry And The Dance In Mediaeval Music - Millenarium (2012)

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Love, Revelry And The Dance In Mediaeval Music - Millenarium (2012)

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The ensemble MILLENARIUM has recorded several discs for RICERCAR devoted to the secular monodic repertoire of the Middle Ages. These are brought together here to give a very complete view of the secular part of mediaeval music, at a time when the only religious music was Gregorian chant. Here are to be found the principal sources of this repertoire: songs of the troubadours and trouvères, tender or bawdy pieces from the famous Carmina Burana manuscript, and from the same anthology, the reconstruction of the Messe des joueurs. It was in that monodic tradition that the famous Llibre Vermell of the Abbey of Montserrat was also composed, bringing together the songs of the pilgrims of Santiago de Compostela.

The disc Danza is devoted to the little-known repertoire of mediaeval dance music and instrumental pieces that provoke an irresistible urge to dance! The album is completed by the remarkable recording of pieces for organetto made by the two founding members of Millenarium, Christophe Deslignes (organetto) and Thierry Gomar (percussion).

Composer: Anonymous, Cantigas de Sa Anonymous, Marcabru, Troubadour Anonymous, …
Conductor: Christophe Deslignes
Orchestra/Ensemble: Namur Chamber Choir, Psallentes, Millenarium, …

Reviews: Millenarium is an early-music instrumental ensemble directed by organist Christophe Deslignes and percussionist Thierry Gomar. Personnel on the albums listed above have ranged from just the pair ( The Masters of the Florentine Organetto , on Trecento organ music) to seven musicians ( Libre Vermell, Danza ) with other groups added for specific projects ( Libre Vermell, Carmina Burana: Officium Lusorum , etc.). Millenarium has focused on the late medieval/early Renaissance end of the early-music spectrum in the 13th and 14th centuries, paying particular attention to the scholarly reconstruction of music based on surviving commentaries, images, and a close study of both classical and folk traditions. None of this conveys the vitality, period sense of style, or improvisational skill that these recordings supply.


If you aren’t familiar with the group, then taken together, their performances probably come closest to those of the Boston Camerata in terms of program design and stylistic approach. In Joy and Douce amie , longer songs alternate with short dances, and an Arabic influence upon the latter is pronounced. Successive strophes of songs are performed with vocal improvisation and without instrumental shifts in the accompaniment, though Deslignes writes of “light cutting” to avoid monotony for modern audiences. (There’s much debate over whether troubadours and trouvères varied ornamentation or accompaniment during lengthy songs, but evidence is lacking for any conclusions—and indeed, may never have existed. Variations in performance over time and place may well have existed.) Although spoken word isn’t used as binder as the Boston Camerata does, there is a palpable sense of theater in most of these albums, in the sense of the spectator/listener being drawn in to a highly expressive, self-referential world.


The most distinctive of the included albums in this respect is the Carmina Burana: Officium Lusorum disc. Where the Carmina Burana: Tempus transit… album is concerned with philosophy, and sacred and secular love, Officium Lusorum attempts (with the assistance of research by Pierre-Emmanuel Guilleray) to recreate a Mass of the Fools—part of the All Fools Day, or Feast of the Fools, that the Roman Catholic Church tolerated while it had to, as an inheritance of the pagan Roman Hilaria Matris Deûm , and then slowly strangled as its secular power base grew. Millenarium sets the framework of their re-creation between Christmas and 12th Night, in 13th-century northern France, by which time the Ordinary of the Mass was considered sacrosanct, and is surrounded here by goliard-inspired parody. The result is an accurate performance of Mass organum, providing the greatest possible contrast to lively dances and satiric literary content, sometimes bitingly so—as in the calling down of God’s curses upon all those, secular and sacred, who are avaricious and refuse to support beggars: “Effunde, domine, iram tuam super avaros et tenaces…”


The musical side of this humor includes but is not limited to over-elaborate vocal ornamentation, grotesque slurring between notes, gasping breaths between phrases of off-pitch plainchant, foreign cultural interpolations, and folk style improvisations on top of chant. In bloodless print this sounds repetitive and dull, but the performers manage to sustain several cuts of this, among them one lasting 24 minutes. Various groups have recorded similar efforts over the years, most memorably René Clemencic and his Clemencic Consort (currently on Harmonia Mundi 195335), but I find Millenarium’s version just as lively if more dramatic due to internal contrasts with the Ordinary. As always where perceptions of humor are concerned, your mileage may differ.


I have nothing but praise for Ricercar’s inclusion of the copious cut listings and liner notes from each of the albums, but shouldn’t they have considered adding a contents page? The 111-page, French and English booklet simply offers one album’s listings and notes after another. With no easy method to locate any album save the first, it’s a bit of a chore finding what you want. Texts and translations would have been helpful, as well, both in the Carmina Burana material, and the work of the troubadours and trouvères. That aside, highly recommended. There are no right or wrong ways to perform this music, anachronisms and technical deficiencies to one side, and Millenarium’s way with all of it is both thoroughly researched and refreshingly direct.