Flemish Masters

Choral Music of the Netherlands

by Sanford Dole

From 1600 to 1900, Italian and then German composers influenced the stylistic development of Western art music, but before them came the age of the Netherlanders. The name Netherlands back then signified lands from Flanders in the northernmost corner of France through Belgium to the present-day nation of the Netherlands. It was the composers of the Flemish school who established what we now recognize as Renaissance music. Among those old Flemish masters were Josquin, Lassus and Sweelinck, whose music we perform tonight. In the twentieth century, when no single nation dominated classical music, the Netherlands saw a new flowering of musical talent. To represent this second renaissance, we bring you pieces by Dutch composers Ton de Leeuw and Henk Badings.

Many consider Josquin Desprez (c.1440–1521) to be the greatest composer of the High Renaissance. Born somewhere in northern France and most likely a student of Ockeghem there, his name first appears in archival evidence as a cathedral singer in Milan in 1459. Josquin’s supremacy during a career spanning sixty years is based on his inexhaustible ability to construct lines that fully live and breathe yet rarely become completely abstract.

His Missa “Pange lingua” is a late work showing his astonishing talent for working with a theme. The title indicates it is a parody mass on “Pange lingua,” a plainsong hymn with lyrics by Thomas Aquinas. (We open our program with the hymn.) A parody mass borrows a melody from a Gregorian source, as here, or a secular song, usually employing the tune as the cantus firmus in the tenor line. In this mass, however, the “Pange lingua” melody impregnates every voice and every section of the mass. If you listen for it as the mass unfolds, you will find the tune most easily identifiable at the beginnings of movements, but the melody and fragments thereof show up repeatedly, always in inventive and engaging ways.

Orlande de Lassus (1532–1594) was born in the town of Mons in what is now Belgium near the French border. When Lassus was twelve, a traveler who heard the boy sing brought him back to Italy to serve at the court in Mantua. Lassus later moved to Naples and Rome before returning at age 23 to Antwerp, where he saw the first edition of his madrigals published. The following year he accepted a post as a singer at the court of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in Munich. Soon promoted to cantor, he remained in the duke’s employ for the rest of his life. From his responsibilities to provide music at daily services came an enormous output of sacred works, including over a hundred Magnificats, at least sixty masses, and hundreds of sacred motets, but he also wrote many madrigals, humorous motets, ceremonial motets, and works in other secular genres.

In 1559, his employer commanded Lassus to compose a set of seven penitential psalms. The duke kept these for his private use and had them copied into a sumptuous manuscript lavishly illuminated. The collection ends with a Laudate Dominum de caelis that combines Psalms 148 and 150. The texts and Lassus’ setting are completely different in tone from the penitential psalms, as jubilant as the latter are somber. The piece might be thought of as an expression of rejoicing or thanksgiving after the completion of penitence. Whatever liturgical reason Lassus had for associating psalms of praise with psalms of penitence, he had a compelling musical reason to do so. The seven penitential psalms are in the first seven church modes, and the Laudate Dominum de caelis, in mode eight, completes the cycle. The whole set is notable for its text painting. To highlight the words, Lassus uses voicings, high or low registration, and a variety of rhythmic devices including rests.

Unlike Josquin, Lassus, and many others in the Flemish school who spent most of their careers far from the Netherlands, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) was a lifelong resident of Amsterdam. He was one of the most famous organists and teachers of his time. He was also the last important composer of the era of the Netherlanders. Although vocal works predominate in his output, not one of them sets a text in his native language; they are for the most part in French. When he began the ambitious project of setting all 150 psalms, the Psalter he chose was one in rhyming French verse, not a Dutch version, probably because the psalms were not intended for use in Calvinist church services, but rather within a circle of well-to-do amateurs among whom French was the preferred language. Sweelinck’s setting of the Psalter is a monument of Netherlandic music unequalled in the sphere of sacred polyphony.

Psalm 148 is one of the composer’s echo psalms, where the full cantus firmus is found in two separate voices, often in canon. Sweelinck divides the text into five sections with four couplets each, unlike Lassus, who set the same psalm in three sections, adding a fourth section for Psalm 150. Sweelinck’s setting is grander not just in length, but also in the extravagant use of seven voice parts, two more than the five most often employed at the time.

Henk Badings (1907–1987) is the only composer on the program not born in the Low Countries. He was born in Indonesia. His parents were Dutch, though, and he moved to the Netherlands at age eight after they died leaving him an orphan. He trained first as an engineer, but later studied with the seminal Dutch composer and music theorist Willem Pijper. Then in his many years as a professor, he taught not only music theory and composition, but also acoustics, geology, and paleontology.

Badings’ later works deal with thematic motifs, and in the ’60s, he moved into electronic music. But in 1946 when he wrote his Trois chansons bretonnes, it was issues of harmony and unusual scales that occupied his musical thought. The French Impressionist composers clearly influenced him, too, for these songs are lush in the way that Debussy’s music is lush, and they paint the lyrics of the Breton poet Théodore Botrel with sensuality and colorful effects.

Ton de Leeuw (1926–1996), one of whose teachers was Badings, worked as a music producer for Dutch radio in the ’50s, and during the ’60s and ’70s, he taught at the music conservatories in Utrecht and Amsterdam. His later scores deal with trends of the time, such as serial and chance techniques, as well as spatial concerns, but his earlier works show the influence of Pijper’s germ-cell technique, in which a motive emerges at both small and large scale throughout a piece.

Prière (1954) belongs to the earlier period. The text is an Islamic prayer set clearly with simple means. The first section is almost entirely homophonic. Later sections introduce polyphony but still retain a sense of repeating the basic material, the germ from which the piece grows, and de Leeuw handles the polyphony skillfully so that it always remains transparent and direct.

The chorus and I thank you for attending our concert and hope you enjoy this evening’s survey of music from the Netherlands. We look forward to seeing you again at our next concerts in June, when we present “Pipes and Drums,” a program of choral works accompanied by organ and percussion.

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