4 - Recording for Posterity: Some Reflections on the Memorialising of Early Renaissance Music

Summary

In the course of a career, the professional classical musician will accumulate numerous stories of performances in inappropriate venues and alienating circumstances. When one is dealing with music of a type which demands a particular atmosphere and acoustic, such occasions can become laughably bizarre. Thus I doubt that those few intrepid souls who witnessed The Clerks’ Group perform in the Royal Festival Hall foyer some years ago in front of an installation which featured a video loop of Yoko Ono’s bare buttocks will be able listen to the sacred polyphony of Busnoys and Dufay in quite the same way again.

A more typical, and less disconcerting, example of this type of disjunction occurred in June 2005, when The Clerks’ Group was privileged to take part in the opening of the newly refurbished Philharmonie in Haarlem in June 2005. The programme consisted of two Requiems: Bernd Zimmerman’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter of 1969 – a work of monstrous proportions, featuring the speeches of notable twentieth-century dictators set alongside the traditional words of the Mass of the Dead – preceded by a selection of movements from Ockeghem’s four-voice Missa Pro defunctis. The producer of the event intended the polyphony of Ockeghem to provide a sober, grave prelude to the frenetic, maniacal main feature, and after a dress rehearsal it was decided to cut two of Ockeghem’s five movements. The job of The Clerks’ Group, it transpired, was to cense the new hall and then depart to make way for the modern and the concrete.

The choice of Ockeghem’s Requiem for this task was principally a symbolic one. Its status as the first surviving polyphonic setting of the Mass for the Dead lends it a gravitas which reinforces the stark, almost naive sonorities of its earlier movements. But, in truth, any Renaissance Requiem – sung with suitable dignity and refinement – might have satisfied the requirements of this event. Indeed, in some respects Ockeghem’s work subverts this role. Its texts are not those of the Requiem as we know it today (no ‘Dies irae’, for example, but instead the psalm ‘Sicut cervus’) and in the version which comes down to us, the cycle concludes not in a mood of other-worldly contemplation but in a self-consciously virtuosic display of compositional artifice.