Arts & Events

The English Vocal Ensemble The Tallis Scholars are led by their founder Peter Phillips, and along with the Belgian vocal group Vox Luminis are considered among the world’s finest choral ensembles. At Berkeley’s First Congregational Church on Friday, May 6, The Tallis Scholars offered a concert that seamlessly blended the 15th century Earthquake Mass of Franco-Flemish composer Antoine Brumel (c. 1460- c. 1520) and the 21st century vocal work sun-centered by David Lang (b. 1957). Cal Performances presented this concert and also co-commissioned David Lang’s sun-centered.  

Lang himself has stated that when he heard Antoine Brumel’s Earthquake Mass based on the words Et ecce terrae motus (And the earth moved), he immediately thought of the work of Galileo proving that the earth moved around an unmoving sun, thereby reversing Christian dogma that placed earth at the center of the universe with a sun that moved around an unmoving earth. 

So David Lang hit on the idea of composing sun-centered as a work that would juxtapose the Brumel Earthquake Mass with his own composition set to texts by Galileo, Francis Bacon, Plato, and others. Utilising only the 12 vocalists called for in the Brumel mass, David Lang created in sun-centered a work that seamlessly spans 500 years of vocal music. 

Antoine Brumel was one of the few Franco-Flemish composers who were natives of France. He studied with the great Josquin des Prez and eventually went on to spend 15 years, from 1505 to 1520, as music director at the court of Alfonso d’Este in Ferrara, Italy. The sole extant score for Brumel’s Earthquake Mass comes down to us in an unfortunately mutilated condition in which the mass’s Agnus Dei section is unperformable. Although the program notes given at this Tallis Scholars concert credited Brumel with the concluding Agnus Dei, the online program notes written by Peter Phillips, director of The Tallis Scholars, acknowledge that he has borrowed an Agnus Dei from Nicholas Gombert’s Missa Temporae Paschalis, adding that since Gombert religiously followed the structures of Brumel’s mass, it may be considered to be Gombert’s homage to the composer who was his predecessor at Ferrara. 

But here we are jumping ahead. Brumel’s opening Kyrie, set to a 7-note chant, establishes this mass securely in the Franco-Flemish tradition of Johannes Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez, Then follows David Lang’s text “The truths we know” loosely borrowed from Galileo, in which Galileo declares he has seen with his own eyes, with the aid of a primitive telescope, things in the heavens never seen before. This text is delivered by one of the group’s basses in what may be called Sprechstimme, and it is backed by a small male chorus. In it Galileo complains that when some people read his account of what he has seen, they not only deny the facts as presented but also accuse their discoverer, Galileo, of having himself placed in the heavens things that were not there. Foremost among Galileo’s claims, of course, is that the earth moves around the sun, not, as Christian dogma insists, that the earth is the center of the universe and remains unmoved while the sun rotates around the earth. 

Next we hear Brumel’s Gloria, and as The Tallis Scholars blend their voices in an inspiring mix of highs and lows, of female and male voices, we can hardly be uninspired by this harmonious outpouring of Christian dogma, even if we, in our current age of scientific skepticism about Church dogma, are in no way believers. There follows vocal music from David Lang set to a text by the philosopher Francis Bacon that begins with the words sung by a tenor, “We find it hard to believe anything that doesn’t put us in the center of the universe.” And this text ends with the sung words, “We believe things we wish were true.” The final section coming before intermission is Brumel’s Credo, a sublime summation of what Christian dogma tells us we should believe. While given its due here by David Lang, we are acutely aware of how the words of this Credo clash with the modern scientific view set forth by Galileo and Francis Bacon. 

After intermission, The Tallis Scholars performed David Lang’s “Hymn to the sun,” which is set, a bit incongruously, to Psalm 19.6, yet another reiteration of Christian dogma regarding the earth as the center of the universe, with a sun that moves around the earth. In this section, high notes are held seemingly forever by the sopranos while the repetitive text is declaimed by the male voices. This configuration is interesting: Should we consider the prolonged female high notes as somehow questioning, or at least holding in abeyance, the Christian dogma sung by the predominantly male members of the ensemble? 

There follows the Sanctus and Benedictus from Brumel; and here we encounter different registers of voices echoing one another. On occasion, various female voices are singled out for glorious solos. Next we have music set by David Lang to words derived from Plato’s Republic. 

This text, interestingly, is delivered in halting stops and starts. It deals with Plato’s famed notion that all we humans perceive are shadows cast upon the walls of a cave. Were we able to step outside this cave, Plato asks, what would we see, and would we believe what we now see as opposed to all we’ve been accustomed to seeing in the mere reflections cast on the walls of our cave? In this music by David Lang, Plato’s questions are all the more intensely relevant. 

What comes next is an Agnus Dei, which, as I’ve said earlier, is not by Antoine Brumel but by his successor in Ferrara, Nicholas Gombert. Though humbly in the style of Brumel, it only reiterates a Christian belief that David Lang’s juxtaposition of scientific and philosophical texts has thoroughly discredited. David Lang’s sun-centered now closes with words attributed to Galileo after he was forced by the pope to recant his discovery that the earth moves around the sun; and these words are simply, “And yet it moves.” These words are repeated, humbly, yet insistently, as this centuries-spanning work, gloriously performed by The Tallis Scholars, comes to a thought-provoking end. 

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Erratum 

Ashley Dixon’s recital was in fact the second of this year’s Schwabacher Recital Series, not the first, as I erroneously asserted in my April 10 review. The first was Nikola Printz’s recital on March 15, which I was unfortunately unable to attend.