Alleluia nativitas

Our response to avant-garde music says a great deal about our own relationship to change. As it is a truism to say that each individual person falls somewhere on the spectrum between resisting and promoting change, so too can works of music project an allegiance that ranges from reactionary to avant-garde. But such designations certainly change with time. For example, what shocked Parisian audiences at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 ruffles far fewer feathers in our contemporary concert world.
Tonight’s program celebrates the changing historical sense of what it means to be avant-garde, the creative to move art beyond prevailing norms. Of course, not all novelty is good or lasting or influential. But just as surely, there would be no life in art without experimentation and transcendence of the past. No Liszt without Beethoven. No Beethoven without Handel. No Handel without Monteverdi. As Newton famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Newton wrote those words in 1675, though a variant of the idea reaches all the way back to the 12th century. A Parisian philosopher and church official, Bernard of Chartres, said he could only see further by being “perched on the shoulders of giants,” by whom he meant the ancient Greeks and Romans. Bernard’s contemporaries at Notre Dame were pushing music beyond the limits of traditional Gregorian chant. A small coterie of musicians, represented to history by the great Pérotin (flourished ca. 1200), were experimenting with polyphony: singing multiple, semi-independent lines moving in different rhythms at the same time. This process started with improvised singing in parallel motion to a given chant melody. Notated harmony thus emerges for the first time, giving music a vertical dimension to complement its horizontal unfolding. Pérotin’s codification of rhythm allowed up to four voices to sing different melodic lines in suitable harmony with one another. Another contemporary, John of Salisbury, captures the sense of awe:

When you hear the soft harmonies of the various singers, some taking high and others low parts, some singing in advance, some following in the rear, others with pauses and interludes, you would think yourself listening to a concert of sirens rather than men, and wonder at the powers of voices . . . . When this goes to excess it is more fitted to excite lust than devotion; but if it is kept in the limits of moderation, it drives away care from the soul and the solicitudes of life, confers joy and peace and exultation in God, and transports the soul to the society of angels.

(c) Jason Stell