Music for Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

A bit over a decade ago, I spent one of my undergraduate summers working on a research grant to study the music of influential organist and composer Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), specifically his mature work Fiori Musicali, which contains three settings of the Mass ordinaries with colourful ricercars and toccatas interspersed. Far from providing enough material for Mass accompaniment across 52 Sundays, Frescobaldi intended the work as a pedagogical demonstration of how one might improvise versets on common chant melodies (during the liturgy of the time, the priest celebrated the Mass in Latin, unheard by the congregation, while robust ordinary and proper settings continued almost without stopping). I travelled to study this repertory on historical organis in Lazio, IT and devoted the remainder of my summer to a study of how this music merged with the contemporaneous liturgy. At the end of my research term, we presented Messa della Madonna with a small schola cantorum and organ in the college chapel using the Roman Rite used at Frescobaldi’s time, drawing several conclusions on performance practice from the pace and timing required to fit the Mass.

Frescobaldi was a musical wunderkind of his time, appointed organist of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Papal Chapel in his early twenties. He published many works that revolutionized the use of the organ, but those in Fiori adhere to a strict, contrapuntal style of the century prior. Ever the master of puzzles, one of the ricercars heard at communion today notes that there is a fifth line to sing without playing it but does not notate it in the score. Frescobaldi cryptically inscribes “Intendo mi chi può, m’intendo io” (“Understand me, whoever can; I understand myself!”). After some investigation, one finds that the famous Marian melody “Ave Maria” can be juxtaposed at several points throughout the piece, allowing the organist to sing it while playing the other four voices, as suggested.

The postlude comes from the Wunderkammer, of Neapolitan composer Giovanni de Macques bizarre works. Little is known about the composer, whose capriccio demonstrates the extravagant ornamentation and modal experimentation common to music of Spain’s colonies on the southern Italian peninsula.

–Abraham Ross

Solemn Mass takes place at St. James’ Anglican Church, Vancouver at 10:30 am every Sunday.