William Byrd and the "Non Nobis" Canon

Thinking of the "Non nobis" reference in the article from The Guild of Our Lady Ransom's The Ransomer, and anticipating the broadcast of Laurence Oliver's Henry V on TCM yesterday, I searched for more information about that canon. I also heard the echo of Patrick Doyle's setting of "Non nobis" in Kenneth Branagh's version of Shakespeare's play.

At one time the music for that canon or round was attributed to William Byrd. But this posting from the Choral Wiki indicates a more complicated history:

This famous canon at the fifth and unison or octave is now generally accepted by musicologists as not having been written by William Byrd (1542/3–1623); the late, eminent Byrd specialist Philip Brett came to the view that most of the canons attributed to Byrd were spurious.

Recent research has shown that the two related figures which form the basis of the Non nobis, Domine canon were extracted from the 5-voice motet Aspice Domine by Philip van Wilder (c. 1500–1554). In the motet both figures are set to the text-phrase Non est qui consoletur (“there is none to console”) which was presumably the text to which the original version of the canon was sung by the Elizabethan recusant community as an expression of nostalgia for the old religious order. 

The words of the motet, taken from the Vulgate Latin of Jeremiah's Lamentations:

Aspice, Domine, quia facta est desolata civitas plena divitiis. 

Sedet in tristitia, non est qui consoletur eam, nisi tu, Deus noster. 

Behold, O Lord, how the city full of riches is become desolate. 

She sits in mourning, there is none to comfort her save only thou, our God.

But the words of the Non nobis version of the motet have a different source, according to the Choral Wiki article:

The Non nobis, Domine text to which the canon is sung today was apparently taken from the first collect from the thanksgiving service added to the Book of Common Prayer to celebrate the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605.

And Wikipedia's entry on Non nobis has this note about its occurrence in Shakespeare's play and in a 1542 report on the Battle of Agincourt:

Shakespeare, in Henry V Act IV Scene 8, has the king proclaim the singing of both the Non nobis and the Te Deum after the victory at Agincourt. The canon is sung in the 1944 film of Henry V (starring Laurence Olivier) and also in the 1989 film of the same title (starring Kenneth Branagh), though we now know that the retexted version was not in existence as early as 1599, when the play was written. There is no stage direction in the play to indicate the singing of Non nobis Domine , but if Shakespeare had a specific setting in mind he was probably thinking anachronistically of a Protestant metrical psalm tune. However, in Hall's Chronicle (1542) Non nobis is sung as part of the complete psalm, presumably to plainsong [plainchant] or faburden.

When the kyng had passed through the felde & saw neither resistence nor apparaunce of any Frenchmen savyng the dead corsses [corpses], he caused the retrayte to be blowen and brought al his armie together about, iiij [4]. of the clocke at after noone. And fyrst to geve thankes to almightie God gever & tributor of this glorious victory, he caused his prelates & chapelaines fyrst to sing this psalme In exitu Israel de Egipto, commaundyng every man to knele doune on the ground at this verse. Non nobis domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam, whiche is to say in Englishe, Not to us lord, not to us, but to thy name let the glory be geven: whiche done he caused Te deum with certeine anthemes to be song gevyng laudes and praisynges to God, and not boastyng nor braggyng of him selfe nor his humane power.

In plainchant, this might have been what the English sang at Agincourt. (And that's the Plainchant Mode we use at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament when we chant Psalm 115 in Sunday Vespers during Advent and Lent!) 

This makes for an interesting juxtaposition of memories, depending on when the play was performed. After 1605, Non nobis reminded audiences of the Gunpowder Plot; before and after 1605, it might have  reminded some Recusant Catholics in the audience of the "old religious order."

Not to us, O Lord, but to Your Name be the Glory! Amen.

The Mass at Dawn of Christmas Day at the End of May

In response to my post at the National Catholic Register on liturgical music, a representative from the Church of St. Mary's in Norwalk, Connecticut reached out to me through the blog editor and offered me a review copy of Lux Fulgebit. This is the first CD released by the parish's Schola Cantorum, and I hope it is not the last.

The title refers to the Introit of the Mass at Dawn of Christmas Day--which is the only Mass on that day that also celebrates St. Anastasia, who was martyred on December 25, 304 during the persecution by Diocletian (she is listed among the early martyrs in the Roman Canon)--and combines plainchant with a sixteenth century, pre-English Reformation setting of the Mass.

The setting of the Mass, Christe Jesu, is by William Rasar, who was a clerk at King's College, Cambridge and whose only surviving work is this Mass, found in the Peterhouse Partbooks (incomplete, missing the tenor part) and the Forrest-Heyther Partbooks (complete). The CD presents all the parts of the Mass, from the Introit to the Post-Communion Prayer and dismissal, and also includes three motets, one each by Alfonso Ferrabosco, William Byrd, and Walter Lambe. The parish's priest, Father Richard G. Cipolla, chants all the parts proper to his role: the Collect, Epistle, Gospel, Preface, etc (note: no Secret, which is prayed silently in the Extraordinary Form).

The liner notes by Charles Weaver, one of the Schola singers, conclude with these comments:

This recording is not a reconstruction of an historical liturgy at which the Rasar Mass was first sung. The Sarum rite used in England at the time did not contain the Christmas Mass at dawn, and prior to the Reformation, men and women never sang together in church: boys provided the treble part. In the most important musical establishments there would have been several singers on each part. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine a small mixed ensemble like ours singing in a private Mass during the Elizabethan period. More importantly, this is a presentation of sixteenth-century liturgical music in a living context: the modern liturgy of the Roman Church in continuity with that of the sixteenth century, in which we sing every week at St. Mary’s Norwalk. The liturgical reforms of the mid-twentieth century, like those of Edward and Elizabeth, have nearly put an end to the Church's musical continuity with the past. The liturgy was greatly simplified, to invite the greater participation of the faithful, but in practice this meant discarding much music in Latin, including the plainchant that had been the backbone of the church’s liturgical prayer for over a millennium. This was unintentional, as many ecclesiastical documents have made clear: chant and sacred polyphony are treasures of the Church, quite apart from their obvious objective value as great achievements of human civilization. At small parishes like St. Mary’s Norwalk, the important work of keeping this music alive is happening: not preserving it as in a museum, but in the life of a community at prayer. Thanks to the support of the people of St. Mary’s, the Mass Christe Jesu has now been recorded for the first time.

The CD is available from the church's website, which provides excerpts from the Mass and other background materials. This recording, beginning with the cover photo on the booklet, is a great spiritual and historic accomplishment. We will add it to our prayers on Christmas Day!

A Sequence of Music for Lent, St. Joseph, and the Annunciation

I haven't figured out what music on this CD is for St. Joseph, but listening to Miserere on the vigil of the First Sunday of Lent, I appreciated the mixture of plainhant, Renaissance polyphony, and contemporary liturgical music composed at and performed in Westminster Cathedral. Unlike Harry Christopher's The Sixteen, the Westminster Choir has boys singing the soprano parts, and realizing that this choir sings this music in the context of the Mass and not in a concert hall added to the devotional impact for me. Then when we went to Mass on Sunday the choir sang an English translation of the first chant on the CD, "Attende Domine" and everything just fit. The liner notes describe the chant melody thus:

Plainsong exists to solemnify the text that it adorns. Attende, Domine has its origins in the Mozarabic Rite of the tenth century and is one of the more emotionally complex melodies in the literature. It is classified by Solesmes dogma as a Lydian tune, although it is authentically Ionian. On the one hand the chant drives the physical momentum of litaneic procession, while on the other it colours the plangency of Lenten supplication. The aural hook of this hymn of exhortation comprises two consecutively occurring perfect fourths (heard at the beginning of the second phrase of the refrain). This descending medieval solecism occurs to great effect no fewer than eleven times, and since the nineteenth century this chant has beguiled the willing ears of Anglicans as well as those of Roman Catholics, as witnessed by the melody’s prominent inclusion in the English Hymnal of 1906 under the title ‘A Lent Prose’.

It "beguiled [my] willing ears" too!