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Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium"Date: October 5, 2011 by Kaleb Abbott  Views: 7067
I'm doing a research project for my Masters in Music, and I'm curious to see what everyone has found on the topic of whether Tomas Luis de Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium" should be conducted in a fast 2 or a slow 4. Please let me know what you have found! Thank you.
Replies (12): Threaded | Chronological
Robert Eaton on October 5, 2011 9:28am
Neither, the work does not fit strict meter. Look at phrase, textual inflection, etc.
on October 5, 2011 9:04pm
Kaleb: No way to tell how familiar you are with renaissance performance practice, so a few points to keep in mind. (And I just looked at 7 of the 13 editions available on the CPDL website.)
1. Forget the bar lines. Robert is correct. Maintain a regular taktus of around 60, but do NOT beat a conducting pattern. Instead study the music and discover the large-scale note groupings that derive from the INDIVIDUAL shapes of the phrases in the individual parts. I didn't "find" that anywhere; it's what the music tells me it wants.
2. The original notation apparently starts with a breve followed by two semibreves. (Double whole note followed by two whole notes.) The mensuration sign is tempus imperfectum diminutum, also know as "alla breve," which means that the taktus indicates the breve. That suggests to me a down-up motion in the first "bar," which would be the equivalent of the SLOW 2 that you ask about (and I'm sure Allen is correct and you reversed your wording). If you beat a "fast 4" the music will bog down and have no shape to it, especially in the kind of resonant church it was probably written for. (All but one edition have halved the note values, making the first note a whole note, but that doesn't change the information we can derive from the original note values and mensuration sign.)
3. Fast notes are ornamental and should never be belabored.
4. The original key appears to be a D minor opening, ending in G minor (actually probably Dorian mode once-transposed up a 4th to G--the original meaning of the one flat key signature). Most editions raise that a whole step or a minor third.
5. At bar 53 the original proportion sign appears to have been 3/1, meaning that each triple-time measure is equal to HALF a measure of the original tempo. In the original notation, 3 semibreves in the time of one semibreve, which should be conducted one to the bar and moves right along without sounding rushed. The the ending goes back to the original mensuration. None of the other editions give that crucial information, and some imply a 3:2 proportion rather than 3:1 by using a 3/2 TIME SIGNATURE rather than a PROPORTION SIGN. Victoria's notation is unambiguous.
6. Of those I looked at, the edition by Edward Tambling seems to give the most original information about mensuration, original key, original clefs, and original proportion sign. Even if you use a different edition you should download that one for reference because of the value of that information.
It's a beatutiful piece. Enjoy it!
All the best,
John
on October 7, 2011 6:04am
Actually, as one can see here:
the original proportion indicated is 3:2.
It is still a proportion sign and not a modern time signature, but should the proportion in this case not be three brevis of the new meter equal two brevis of the old?
And I agree that the tactus should have a connection to our rest blood pulse - might be a little slower than that, maybe a little faster, but still that you can feel the relation (!NOT! proportion to the pulse).
Also, it is important to keep in mind that the music at the time was not conducted as we know today - conducting patterns began to evolve in the early 19th century out from the bar pattern as metrical and rhythmical organisation. In the renaissance, the tactus was the unemphasized and unphrased basis, on which the individual parts phrased and formed the music after the shape of their own musical line. So conducting renaissance music with a conducting pattern goes against the nature of the music, since it imposes an emphasizing organisational metric pattern that the music does not have.
By the way, I always prepare my own scores when I am conducting renaissance (or early baroque, Schütz, Schein etc.) music. I remove all the bar lines of traditional editions (they are editorial in any case, as you can see in the picture above) and then put in individual bar lines separately for every part. These bar lines follow the phrasing and the metric structure of the individual part. That means that very rarely, parts have barlines at the same point of the timeline, the barlines are not organisational to keep the ensemble together, but rather indicate for evey part separately, how I think the phrasing should be. In my experience with "conventional" editions, choristers tend to follow the graphical layout and emphasize these barlines that have nothing to do with the flow of the music - especially when the barlines run all the way through and notes have to be separated and held together by slurs.
All the best,
Jan
on October 7, 2011 12:03pm
Jan: Thank you for finding and posting that example. It does supply the information that was missing in every edition I looked at, not only a proportion sign of 3/2 but the mensuration sign of tempus perfectum diminutum (actually redundant in this case). So you're quite correct, the proportion should be 3 semibrevers in the new section in the time of 2 semibreves preceding. That's why it is SO important for editors to provide this kind of information, and not just something like "Allegretto"!!! And actually no surprise, since the 3/2 is much more prevenant than the 3/1 proportion. (When we did Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" a couple of the dance breaks were difficult to figure out and resulted in a much quicker tempo than blind faith would have, but the music worked wonderfully when we got it right!)
I too like to remove all bar lines when I edit for my own ensemble, although I do put the parts in score order. And since Sibelius (and Finale) still assumes that the barlines are there, although hidden, I can also insert bar numbers, which help in rehearsal and also help orient the singers not yet used to music without barlines. I have not adopted the individual-part barring as you describe it, although that's certainly one of the standard approaches and is MUCH better than using mensurstriche between the staves.
We're currently preparing LeJeune, "Revecy venir du printans," and using an edition without barlines except to indicate the beginning of a new verse/refrain. It really took my instrumentalists a while to get the hang of it! (They're reading from score, except for the violist for whom I made a part in alto clef.)
Thanks again.
John
on October 6, 2011 4:46am
I suggest you look at facsimiles of the original partbooks (http://www.uma.es/victoria/1572/1572.html). In Victoria's times the tactus was the duration of one semibrevis (the diamondlike notehead). It was divided into a downbeat and an upbeat, each thus taking a minima (the ones that look like modern half-notes). The tactus was often compared to the speed of the heart beating, which might give some indication of a possible speed. Sing from the partbooks beating like this a few times and then move to the modern score you are using. There is no simple solution. Mine is: conduct in two and think in four (feel the quarter-note beat). In some ways the four might come closer to the rhythmic feeling of the sixteenth-century performers, but it also creates a lot of regular emphases, which often contradict the music.
on October 6, 2011 5:29am
For most of it I would conduct in a slow 2, but be sure not to give too many downbeats as there should not really be any stylistically; you don't want to alter the stress of the text. Get the choir started and keep the lines moving rather than staying in a strict pattern.
on October 6, 2011 6:02am
It has to follow the text. You could remove all metrical reference other than the text and it would probably sound better. Before determining how the conductor should conduct this, first determine whether there WAS a conductor, look at the original score (if possiible) and determine whether it was actually written with all parts on one page or whether it each part was given only its own line to learn, in which case, the layering of the parts and texts becomes even more pronounced. Before deciding what Vittoria wanted, you might also want to look at the common notational practices of his time period and geographical location.
on October 8, 2011 11:25am
Jason
For a more complete discussion on the rhythm and phrasing of renaissance music see John Haberlen's excellent chapter "Rhythm: The Key to Vitalizing Renaissance Music" in Five Centuries of Choral Music-Essays in Honor of Howard Swan by Gordon Paine and Howard Swan. For anyone delving into renaissance literature I consider it a "must read" as well as the chapter that follows on tactus and tempo by Gordon Paine. See Google books: http://tinyurl.com/3haeub2
Best wishes
Scott Dean
on October 5, 2012 5:20am
To confuse the issue, the mensuration sign in Victoria's 1572 edition is tempus imperfectum diminutum, but the 1583 edition has tempus perfectum (C without vertical line). Clearly, Victoria, or his editors, were not consistent in their annotation conventions. On the other hand, both versions have the the proportion 3/2 in bar 53, indicating a triplum tempo (a triplet in modern notation), but it is thus not obvious if the triplum beat relates to the breve or the semibreve.
All of this shows to me that we should not be too strict in our interpretation of signs and other annotations, but follow our musical intuition, much as has been argued in the replies above.
As an aside: another interesting difference is the omission of the # in bar 25 of the alto in the 1583 version, whereas this version does have the # in cadensa (e.g. bar 62) which are not shown in the 1572 version.
Enjoy the music! Wim
on October 5, 2012 11:07am
Thank you for this, Wim. I would say rather that it's best to START by knowing exactly what the exact interpretation means (or in this case both or all four of the possible interpretations), and THEN allow your musical instincts to take over and suggest which works the best musically. That's a bit different from relying entirely on musical intuition.
Different acoustics can, of course, call for different tempi.
Regarding the sharp, would it have been understood as required (or strongsly suggested) by the rules of musica ficta?
John
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