Music in the time of the popes

Many other places of worship existed in the palace, which had six chapels and many large rooms capable of receiving portable altars. You have to imagine the immense and empty places that we can visit today as they could be in their heyday. The furniture there was luxurious; on feast days, the walls were largely covered with richly decorated hangings and tapestries, revealing the sumptuous pictorial decor that we can still admire today in places. On certain important occasions, the crowd followed the many processions and was allowed to attend the liturgies. We then crowded to better see the richly decorated vestments of the cardinals, the brilliant decorations adorning the altar and the choir, the magnificent papal cathedra behind the altar, and to listen to the extraordinary and new polyphonic compositions of the cantors, housed in their enclosure. particularly to the east of the Grande Chapelle.

By the 1330s, the Church was collecting its income very efficiently, which was not the case in the previous period, and the treasure chests were filling up quickly. It is difficult to imagine the very un-evangelical luxury of the Avignon curia. If it may seem shocking to us today, we must recognize that the Palais des Papes quickly became a fundamental artistic center, ideally placed halfway between Rome and Paris, for which worked, and in which lived the greatest artists of that time: musicians, painters, poets, sculptors, architects... Artists from northern Europe learned the art of Italian frescoes and miniatures there, while Italian artists became familiar with sculpture and the architecture of northern Europe. At the beginning of the reign of Clement VI, for example, five men among the most brilliant figures of the century, the musician Philippe de Vitry, the painter Matteo Giovannetti, the poet Petrarch, the astronomer Johannes de Muris and the mathematician Lévi Ben Gerson, had undoubtedly very fruitful discussions together!

Within the curia, “the papal chapel” is an institution created by Benedict XII in 1334 to replace the “Schola cantorum” Roman, who did not follow the pope in his many travels. From the outset, it included 12 chaplains, a number that varied little, not to be confused with the “commensal” chaplains, high-ranking dignitaries sharing the pope's meal, often advisers or high officials of the curia. This group of singers will acquire considerable fame during the XNUMXth century and this light will later attract the musicians Dufay, Agricola, Josquin….

If the painters chosen for the decoration of the palace were mainly Italian, the clerics called upon to participate in the chapel came for the vast majority of them from the north of France. Clement VI, in particular, took up an already established practice and institutionalized a tradition that would last more than two centuries, thus explaining the strong French influence now exerted on the papal liturgy, which until then had been very Roman.

These chaplains were the best singers in the western world. The pope did not hesitate to recruit them from the chapters of the great cathedrals or from the private chapels of cardinals and kings. Hired to sing the masses and the canonical hours, they were also often composers of sacred as well as secular music, and very probably had to participate in the entertainments at the end of the meal of the pontiff and his distinguished guests, by singing their motets. In the name of very strict respect for the rule prohibiting the Curia from any mixture of sacred and profane domains, the pope could not have minstrels in his private service, but his chaplains and the musicians of his hosts made up for this lack. THE "gay pope who will happily and sweetly listen without desplaysance” described in a virelai of the Chantilly manuscript, is probably Clement VII (Robert of Geneva), a lover of extraordinary festivities, of which we know, moreover, that he sang remarkably.

His pontificate at the end of the century represents the pinnacle of Avignon splendor. The Vatican archives have fortunately been preserved and it is moving for us to know very exactly the names of all the chaplains and their “magister” who succeeded each other at the Palais des Papes. The very precise accounts also indicate to us the high degree of wealth that their function enabled them to reach at the end of the century. THE "singers” of the XNUMXth century give the impression of a very closed caste, of a solidarity brotherhood of a very high artistic and intellectual level, and which is moreover strongly aware of it. Contacts between chaplains of the different chapels were numerous and the directories seem to have circulated much more than was first thought.

This remark is particularly valid for the main genre that concerns us here: the polyphonic mass.. The habit of singing the Ordinary of the Mass in polyphony will develop considerably in the second half of the century, on the initiative of the papal chapel. The repertoire of the School of Notre Dame in the XNUMXth century already included a few short texts (Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus) put into polyphony, but the composers of the XNUMXth century generalized this practice and were especially interested in Gloria et Credo whose longer texts allow them to innovate more.

At the end of the century, the polyphonic mass had become a very important genre which would quickly spread from its almost unique center of creation: the papal chapel.. The manuscripts that transmit this mass music to us almost all come indirectly from the chapel, even if many of the pieces copied and transmitted in Avignon may in fact have been created elsewhere. The habit then was to choose, for a given day, the different pieces of the ordinary that it was appropriate to sing, without real musical relations between them, but the concern to give a unity which is not only textual is done day gradually. So we proceeded in this way to “compose” the two masses of the program: one with 3 voices and a second which includes movements with 4 voices. The masses of Tournai, Machaut, Toulouse and Barcelona are early exceptions, and the mass on cantus firmus unique will only appear in the XNUMXth century, with Guillaume Dufay.

John XXII, in 1324-1325, rose well against the abuses of the young composers of the new school (Ars Nova), who introduced hiccups and short notes into their chants, and above all, like his two predecessors, against the risks of secularization of sacred chant, but the situation changed radically in 1342 when Clement VI began to systematically recruit the best cantors from the north of the France. From this precise date, the polyphonic ordinary is attested in the papal chapel, but it must have been present there during major feasts for a long time already. At the end of the century, polyphony was authorized at Mass for all liturgical time except for the time of the Passion, that is to say approximately 50 weeks, and this even in the absence of the pope! On the other hand, there is no polyphonic music for the canonical hours. The singers certainly had to improvise polyphonically on plainsong.

The rule always respected in the papal chapel was solo singing a cappella, although the numbers made it possible to double the votes, and this possibility was no doubt sometimes exploited. The first mention of an organ concerns the chapel of the anti-pope in exile Benedict XIII, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century. Similarly, the voices of boys, which are beginning to be used in the chapels of cardinals, are strictly prohibited in the service of the sovereign pontiff.

The composers of polyphonic ordinaries simply used and developed the three main styles in force at their time:

• the style leads: homophony undoubtedly related to improvised polyphony more than to the School of Notre-Dame, but which can integrate all the audacious novelties of theArs Nova.
• the motet style: as in the XNUMXth century, with a liturgical content or not, serves as a support for one or two upper voices provided with often different texts.
• the cantilena style: under the “instrumental carpet” that the lower voices unroll for it, a single voice has a text, in imitation of rondos, virelais, profane ballads, but without a chorus.