Latin Motets and Anthems in Modern European Languages
Have a listen to the final fugal entry of this Bach motet Sing to the Lord a New Song. The skill of top level choristers like these is unreal. That final two minutes is some of the finest choral singing I’ve ever heard!
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
The first anthem I ever sang I think must have been come holy Ghost Our Souls Inspire by Thomas Attwood Mozart’s English pupil and founder of the Royal Academy of Music.
We had a very big tradition of singing in the renaissance and some of the greatest early British anthems stem form the time of the reformation. Thomas Tallis and William Byrd composed in both Latin and in English.
Watch! by William Byrd
If Ye Love Me by Thomas Tallis
Perhaps the most defining polyphonic style of the late renaissance was that of Giovanni di Palestrina, a polymath and greatest composer of his age. His music was the envy and blueprint for all catholicism in music until the 20th century. Here are a couple of his finest works.
The most famous work Renaissance history is Allegri’s Miserere which was so famous as i was only sung once a year openly in the papal church St Peter’s in Rome and it if you were a grand tourist it was essential to hear it there. One such tourist determined to prove that it was not impossible to steal it note for note was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who was so intelligent he is said to have heard it once only, travelled all the way home with his father and wrote it out immaculately note for note to which the pope replied that it was a miracle and it was published for the first time then. The high notes were added later by Mendelssohn and weren’t part of the original composition.
Perhaps the greatest choral work of the late Renaissance era was however Tallis’s 40 part motet Spem in Alium. Have a listen to both and decide for yourself.
That brings us on to the start of the Baroque and one of my favourite Early Music Motets of all. I performed it myself in the Lower Sixth Chamber Choir at school Beatus Vir by Claudio Monteverdi composed at his court in Mantua in Northern Italy in the lake country not far from Venice. Monteverdi is the 10th most influential composer of all time the inventor of chordal or homophonic music and the founder of the Baroque era of music. I’ve also included another work of 8 voices to show you how he wrote in both Renaissance and Baroque styles at first. Monteverdi also composed secular music most influentially also founded the tradition of composing Opera.