Saints and the cantus firmus of life
"There is always a danger of intense love destroying what I might call the "polyphony" of life. What I mean is that we should love God eternally with our whole hearts, but not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter and Papers from Prison) It is difficult to generalize about the saints, surely as richly variegated a group as could be found within humankind. Some were virgins and martyrs, but certainly not all. Some were learned, but others very simple. Some were gracious and lovable, but many would never have won a personality contest. Perhaps there really were some that one could meet "at tea," although I have never been absolutely convinced of this. One of the definitive characteristics of those we call "saints" is their capacity for a sustained focus on God and the things of God, an enduring ability to keep their "eyes on the prize" of the "upward call of God, " to be "in the world but not of it," to have the music of their lives set forth in glorious array one fixed melody (a cantus firmus) sounding forth majestically through all the changes and chances of this life. Their love of God however powerful and controlling was modulated into many modes, constantly interweaving sometimes harmoniously and sometimes discordantly with the other themes and rhythms of life in this world. Sometimes the radical transcendence of their lives is most clearly seen in those moments of dissonance, moments when incompatible notes clash together demanding some higher resolution (in music these are called cross relations). The Mass setting for this year’s All Saints Eucharist is a cantus firmus mass. Josquin DesPrez (1450-1521) was arguably the greatest composer before J.S. Bach. Of his music Martin Luther once remarked, "All other composers must do what the notes want, only Josquin can make the notes do what he wants." Following an artistic convention common at least since the thirteenth century Josquin bases his polyphonic (many independent musical voices) mass on a cantus firmus, in this case the fourteenth-century plainsong tune for a hymn attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas (the text can be found at number 329 in the hymnal). Josquin begins each movement of the Mass with a quotation of the opening melodic line of the chant, although in many different rhythms. This might seem a little abstract and formulaic for a compositional process, but remember Luther’s assessment that Josquin could make the notes do what he wanted them to do. Each movement unfolds with great ingenuity and beauty, references to the plainsong migrate effortlessly to melodies of Josquin’s invention with a constantly shifting texture – four independent voices, duos, pairs of voices played off against each other. Rarely Josquin reduces the texture to simple four-part chords, according to convention at the most profound phrases of the Creed: et incarnates est – as if the unutterable mystery of the Incarnation of God required only the simplest musical expression, a kind of musical genuflection. Actually, the most common uses of the plainsong hymn are difficult to pick out of the texture, based as they are on interior phrases of the hymn: fructus ventris geerosi Rex effudit gentium. Perhaps it is no accident that the textual reference to the "fruit of the womb" literally fructifies into a rich and dense musical texture. Throughout it all, the listener is again and again called to pange lingua – "sing, my tongue, the mystery telling, of the glorious Body sing. "The All Saints’ Eucharist will be framed by J.S. Bach’s greatest organ composition, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor." Set in the ultimately "cosmic" key (the lowest key in its minor form) this work exploits the full tonal resources of an organ in a Baroque style. This work itself is an astonishing set of variations on a simple, borrowed melody, stated in single notes at the beginning (the Kyrie from an organ mass by the eighteenth century French composer André Raison). Albert Schweitzer called it a musical embodiment of Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed, in a way the ultimate musical cantus firmus.
