Music Notes for Sunday, May 18, 2025

Music for Fifth Sunday of Easter

Ubi caritas – Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)

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For Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) composition was a slow, laborious process involving constant revision and impeccable craftsmanship. After sixty years only ten works had been published—one fewer than his teacher Paul Dukas, a similarly fastidious perfectionist. Unlike his friend and fellow student Olivier Messiaen, Duruflé eschewed the avant-garde experimentation that might have resulted in a fashionable new language, choosing instead a retrospective stance, looking to plainsong for his inspiration, and great French composers—Debussy, Ravel, Fauré and Dukas—for his models.

In 1960 Duruflé wrote four short motets which he dedicated to Auguste Le Guennant, the director of the Gregorian Institute in Paris. All four of them are based on melodies from the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes, which issued the official, most widely recognized edition of Gregorian chant. This Sunday’s communion motet in church, Ubi caritas, is one of these four. Its text and foundational melody are an antiphon taken from the Mass for Maundy Thursday. It is fitting that it is sung this Sunday, when the Gospel reading is the same passage from St John that was read on Maundy Thursday, an exhortation to Christian love.

Duruflé’s setting begins and ends with only the darker choral sound of the altos, tenors and basses. Each phrase of the text is repeated and the altos alternate singing them in two separate choirs. The tenors are subdivided into two voice parts in order to maintain four-part chordal harmony. After the sopranos enter for the exultant central section, the harmonic structure increases to five parts.

Where charity and love are, God is there.
Christ’s love has gathered us into one.
Let us rejoice and be pleased in Him.
Let us fear, and let us love the living God.
And may we love each other with a sincere heart.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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Music Notes for Sunday, May 11, 2025

Music for Fourth Sunday of Easter

 

Messe ‘Cum jubilo’ (Op. 11) – Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)

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Duruflé’s Mass ‘with rejoicing’, as it is subtitled in Gregorian chant anthologies, is based upon the first of several plainchant settings used in Masses for feast days celebrating aspects in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. While the vocal line takes its cue from the actual plainchant melody and its constantly shifting metre, Duruflé’s modern setting embraces a much broader tonal spectrum than the original medieval modal scales. The connection between Mary and the month of May can be traced back to ancient times. This setting of the Mass ordinary is offered this Sunday in church in her honour.

In Duruflé’s setting the choral ensemble is streamlined to very simple dimensions: a unison ensemble of tenor and bass voices, with a baritone soloist featured in various sections of the work. In that solo/choral arrangement, it simulates the monastic practice of alternately singing phrases or verses of Gregorian chant antiphonally in two groups, or responsorially by a cantor alternating with a larger chorus.

Like Duruflé’s better-known Requiem, the instrumental accompaniment was originally composed for orchestra and organ, with subsequent arrangements calling for a smaller instrumental ensemble and organ, or organ alone as it is heard in this performance. The general simplicity of the musical texture and the economy of forces make the Mass ‘Cum Jubilo’ an ideal piece of liturgical service music, available for wide use by choirs of varying sizes.

Gerald Harder

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