Jean
Mouton belonged to one of the most extraordinary generations of
composers the Western world has ever produced. The most famous of his
contemporaries was Josquin des Prez, but they also included Jacob Hobrecht,
Henricus Ysaac, Pierre de la Rue (all born within a few years of Mouton
and Josquin), slightly older musicians such as Alexander Agricola, Loyset
Compère and Johannes Martini, and slightly younger ones like Antoine
Brumel and Antoine de Févin. It would be as idle to try to rank them as
to debate the precedence of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; all were superb
composers with an important influence on their successors. But to ears
attuned to the important shifts in musical style that occurred between the
late-medieval sound-world of Guillaume Du Fay (c.1397–1474)
and the early-modern sound-world of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525–94), Mouton’s music will stand out from that of his
contemporaries as the most ‘advanced’—more even than Josquin, and
much more than the others, Mouton paved the way for the classic vocal
polyphony of the sixteenth century.
Jean
de Holluigue, called ‘Mouton’, was probably born in Samer (not far
from Boulogne) in the mid-to-late 1450s. Our knowledge of his early life
is incomplete: he was a singer and teacher at Nesle near Péronne in
1477–83, at St Omer in 1494–95, at Cambrai Cathedral briefly in 1498,
at Amiens in 1500 (all these within 120 km of Samer), and then moved to
the other end of France, to Grenoble in 1501–2. He may have gone
directly into the service of Anne of Brittany, queen of France, when he
left Grenoble abruptly in 1502; he was certainly a member of her private
chapel by 1509. After Anne’s death in 1514 Mouton became a member of the
official royal chapel, serving first Louis XII and then (from 1515) François
I until about 1520. He spent his last years as a canon of the royal church
in St Quentin (once again not far from Samer), dying there on 30 October
1522.
During
the time of his connection with the royal court he functioned as a kind of
‘composer laureate’, writing many motets to commemorate important
events such as the birth of the royal princess Renée in 1510 (Non
nobis, Domine), Queen Anne’s death in 1514 (Quis
dabit oculis), or François I’s victory of Marignano in 1515 (Exalta
regina Galliae). As the most highly regarded composer attached to the
most prestigious musical institution in Europe, Mouton achieved a
reputation almost equal to Josquin’s. He was the favourite composer of
the music-loving Pope Leo X, and one of his motets (Quaeramus
cum pastoribus) was known even in frontier missions in Guatemala. The
same work was recopied for the Sistine Chapel choir about 100 years after
the composer’s death.
Mouton
is most important as a composer of motets. This genre makes up about
two-thirds of his total number of works, and it was in these pieces that
he made his most original and influential contribution to the music of his
time. The five motets heard on this recording illustrate some of the many
approaches he took to the genre, though far from all of them.
But there is enough to give a clear picture of Mouton’s
importance to his contemporaries and to make the case that his music ought
to be better known in our time.
No
work could fulfil that task better than Nesciens Mater [1], the first work on the present disc. Mouton was
the first master of eight-part composition, a technique that gave rise a
couple of generations later to the double-chorus compositions of Gabrieli
and Palestrina. The way had been pointed in some rather tentative works by
Mouton’s colleague Johannes Prioris, master of the French royal chapel,
but Mouton’s own essays immediately surpassed his models. Nesciens
Mater is the chef-d’œuvre
of them all. In the first place, the motet is a quadruple canon: only four
voices are written out, each giving rise to a canonic part a fifth above
and two bars later. Mouton did not take an easy way out of the problem he
had set himself by leaving plenty of rests in his parts so that he could
work with fewer than eight parts most of the time—instead, all eight
voices are singing nearly all the time. What is more, the tenor canon is
based on the plainchant melody corresponding to the words. The
counterpoint is brilliant, but it is not the technical virtuosity that
makes this an impressive motet. Rather, it is the sheer beauty of the
music, the clarity with which the elegant melodies and gorgeous harmonies
are expressed.
If
Nesciens Mater is among
Mouton’s most mature works, the extremely long Missus est Gabriel angelus / Vera fides geniti [2] is one of his
very earliest. No other of his motets reflects so clearly the influence of
Antoine Busnoys and Johannes Regis, composers a generation older. At the
same time it is a pathbreaking work, perhaps the earliest surviving motet
to set an extended passage from one of the gospels: Luke 1: 26b–38a, the
entire gospel lesson for the votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin. Mouton
wrote several gospel motets during his time at the French court, and
Josquin’s one or two settings of gospel lessons also date from the last
period of his life, but the real popularity of this type of motet came in
the mid sixteenth century. Mouton’s symbolically apt combination of the
gospel text (telling the story of the Annunciation) with the long-note
cantus firmus drawn from the second stanza (stating the Atonement and
Mary’s perpetual virginity) of the Marian hymn Virgo
Dei genitrix shows the influence of Regis’ five-part tenor motets.
The melodic designs, the momentary use of canon, the partial imitations
and the asymmetrically changing textures, however, all recall the style of
Busnoys. Especially notable is the nervous rhythmic texture of the first
large section of the motet, written in note-values half the usual length.
Such a notation appears only in one other motet, an anonymous work from
Busnoys’s circle in the 1470s; Missus
est Gabriel is probably the product of Mouton’s time in Nesle around
1480.
Sancti
Dei omnes
[12] can hardly be much later: it has too much in common not only with Missus
est Gabriel but especially with Josquin’s masterpiece Ave
Maria … virgo serena, a work composed by the early 1480s. But
despite its early date, Sancti Dei
omnes announces a revolution. Missus
est Gabriel shows a marvellous variety of scoring and texture and
great sensitivity to its text, but (perhaps in response to the narrative
character of that text) its incidents simply succeed one another, without
interacting to create a larger sense of form. Sancti
Dei omnes, by contrast, is organized so as to give structure to time
itself while it is being sung. In the first place, it is framed by an
eight-bar refrain (sung with a brief cadential extension at the beginning
and a longer extension at the very end) stated five times, clearly
dividing the motet into four major sections. Each of those is in turn
divided into larger and smaller subsections by changes in texture and by
repetitions, including the kind of ‘pair-imitation’ (brief duos
repeated in the complementary pair of voices) so characteristic of
Josquin’s Ave Maria. The
passage of time is no longer articulated sequentially but hierarchically,
relating the notes into motifs, phrases, and larger and larger assemblages
until the whole work is encompassed—an approach to composition that
culminated three centuries later in the high Classical style of Haydn and
Mozart.
All
the music in this recording comes from manuscripts originating at the
papal court in the early sixteenth century: Missus est Gabriel and Sancti
Dei omnes are sung in the versions copied into a Sistine Chapel
choirbook around 1510, while the other motets come from a manuscript
copied at the papal court as a wedding present for the younger Lorenzo
de’ Medici, duke of Urbino, in 1518; the mass Dictes
moy toutes voz pensees was copied a year or two later for the Cappella
Giulia, the choir of St Peter’s Basilica. The Sistine Chapel copy of Sancti Dei omnes has some interesting variants to the words at one
strategic point. The second half of the motet is based on the words and
music of a plainchant litany, which prays towards the end for the
preservation of churchmen and the speakers’ friends and relations. When
the work was copied for the Sistine Chapel choir, the list of
ecclesiastics was modified to include ‘the cardinals’, obviously an
important constituent of the papal court but not listed in any other
source of Sancti Dei omnes; and
further, a few years later, two other categories not so prominent at
court—‘abbots’ and ‘canons’—were erased and replaced by Cantores,
‘the singers’, as heard here.
The
two remaining motets in this recording, Salva nos, Domine and In omni
tribulatione, are both relatively late works from Mouton’s time at
the French royal court, like Nesciens
Mater. Although both are quite brief, they well illustrate two very
different sides of Mouton’s style. The words of Salva
nos [11] are taken from a plainchant antiphon, whose melody forms the
basis of a canon for two voices, while four more voices are added in free
counterpoint. As in Nesciens Mater,
the texture is full and continuous from the beginning, and the emphasis is
on elegance of melody and richness of harmony rather than projection of
the words. In the version sung here is the canon is sung following at a
fifth above rather than a fourth below the leading voice.
Although this results in some awkward voice-crossing in the soprano
parts, several sources give this instruction, and it is certainly one of
the ways Salva nos was performed
in Mouton’s own time. In omni
tribulatione [10], based on a ritual prayer, is freely composed for
four voices. Although it has no refrain, it is otherwise a microcosm of
the techniques pioneered in Sancti
Dei omnes. The asperities evident in Mouton’s early works and in his
music for more voices are entirely absent, and we can already hear the
voluptuous purity of the ‘Palestrina’ style.
Fifteen
masses survive by Mouton, and we know of at least two lost masses. In
works such as the Missa ‘Quem
dicunt homines’ he was one of the earliest composers to practise the
technique called ‘parody’, basing his music on the whole contrapuntal
fabric of a polyphonic model (in the case mentioned this was a motet by
the younger composer Jean Richafort). This became the normal mode of mass
composition in the rest of the sixteenth century. But although he was
innovative in this respect, in others Mouton’s masses show a remarkable
degree of similarity to one another; none of his contemporaries came close
to his stylistic homogeneity in this genre. It is probable that most of
the masses we possess were composed at the French court, chiefly during
the decade 1505–15, though the one heard here probably dates from
1502–5.
The
Missa ‘Dictes moy toutes voz
pensees’ [4–9] is based on a rondeau [3] by Mouton’s older
contemporary Loyset Compère. The song is a fairly early work by Compère,
probably composed in the late 1470s. It is a rather unusual model, lacking
either a strongly-profiled tenor or frequent points of imitation. Mouton
drew mostly on the tenor part, whose strong opening gesture of an upward
skip of a minor third falling back by step can often be heard at the
beginning of sections of the mass, and whose striking close with its
descending sequence often underpins the ends of sections. The distinctive
opening of the top voice, a rising and falling fourth with a
characteristic rhythm, is also clearly audible at the beginning of many
sections; Mouton was often playful about reversing the discantus and tenor
openings, presenting them together but with the tenor subject entering
first and at a higher pitch than that of the upper voice. His treatment of
the middle portion of the chanson is particularly interesting: Compère
wrote a florid line for the tenor whose chief characteristic is a rising
scale, often using dotted rhythms or short note-values, and accompanied
this with an even more emphatically surging bass-line and a simpler
discantus that descends slowly by step. Mouton presents only the tenor
from these portions of the song, giving them almost exactly as they
originally appeared, but what actually is the pre-existing material on
which the composition is based sounds as if it were simply an
accompaniment to his new countersubjects, which are more clearly defined
and are emphasized by imitation and repetition.
The
whole mass has a simple and relaxed elegance, calmly and expansively
working out the musical implications of the model chanson. The Agnus Dei
provides a strong and fitting climax. The first of its three subsections
emphasizes the song’s top voice more than its tenor, and is the only
portion of the mass where that voice’s broad descending scales from the
mid-section of the chanson are developed. The second Agnus is a lovely
trio for divisi basses
(incidentally, this and the divisi
writing in the top part at the end of the ‘Christe eleison’ prove that
Mouton had in mind such a performance as is heard here, with more than one
singer on a part). The third and final Agnus expands the texture to five
voices, the middle one of which presents the tenor part of Compère’s
song in its entirety, exactly as it stood in the version Mouton was using,
for the only time in the mass. At ‘Dona nobis pacem’ the accompanying
voices toss around a simple motif that has first been heard, at half the
speed, as the principal subject of the second half of the
‘Christe’—an eloquent way of bringing the end of the mass back to
its beginning while tying together the appeals ‘Christ have mercy’ and
‘Grant us peace.’
Jeffrey
Dean
Recorded in the Chapel of St John's College, Cambridge,
14-16 July 2000
Cover picture: Annunciation scene from Lady Margaret
Beaufort's Book of Hours, by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of
St John's College, Cambridge
Musical editions: University of Chicago Press (1,10,11),
Opera Omnia (3-9), Jeffrey Dean (2,12)
