Anonymous - Missa L'ardant desir (15th century)

Missa L'ardant desir
Composer: Anonymous (15th century)
Performers: Cut Circle, dir. Jesse Rodin
Score editors: Jesse Rodin and Emily Zazulia

0:00 Kyrie
3:34 Gloria
11:21 Credo
20:17 Sanctus
28:34 Agnus Dei
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"The Missa L’ardant desir also survives in just one problematic source: a Sistine Chapel choirbook (Cappella Sistina 51, copied before 1488) with its share of errors and perplexing musical notation — but a clean copy from which we can be sure the papal choir performed. The mass was probably written in the North during the 1470s by someone in tune with all the latest compositional trends. And although we neither know the composer’s name nor possess a source for the love song on which the mass is based, David Fallows has used the mass tenor to reconstruct the song. It is easiest to hear the tune in the Cum sancto spiritu.

[T]he tenor was conceived such that it could be notated identically on every page. But this composer’s verbal instructions are even more elaborate. In two sections the tenor must omit all the written rests; elsewhere he reads the music as if the written notes had no stems. In the Agnus dei I he must skip any note followed by a note higher than itself. The piece ends with the tenor being told to swap the largest note values for smallest ones, and vice versa — the musical equivalent of changing 'a' to 'z' and 'z' to 'a' while reading aloud.

As if this weren’t enough, the Sistine Chapel manuscript severely impedes our ability to discern the nature of the tenor 'transformations.' Here the tenor melody appears only in 'resolved' versions that present not the original song, but the notes the tenor sings once the various instructions have been followed. Making matters still more complex, the choirbook lacks the instructions themselves. This is like having an answer without a question — or even any indication that there was a question in the first place. Some years ago, Rob Wegman recognized that this tenor was, in fact, an answer key of sorts, and brilliantly reverse engineered the tenor’s original notational form. What made Wegman’s reconstruction possible is that the transformations are strict: each operates on the same notation of the song melody.

Still another problem remains. The choirbook differs in some incidental respects from a precise realization of the tenor. Where we expect a single long note, for example, we sometimes find two short notes instead. Having reasoned our way back to the original notation, that is, we have to imagine a now lost instruction (e.g., 'omit the stems') that fits the 'resolved' notation that has survived, while simultaneously allowing for the possibility of variants in the resolved version that could at first glance undermine our interpretation. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that until recently one section (the Et resurrexit) remained elusive. After extensive detective work we found the solution — as did (independently, and before us, though we weren’t aware of it until later) — Jason Stoessel.

This piece goes further than the Missa Gross senen in allowing musical complexity to infiltrate reduced-texture sections. The Christe culminates in a passage of rapid-fire sequential writing, the Et incarnatus est and Pleni sunt celi in dense imitation. The Benedictus is less busy, but turns out to be a strict three-voice canon, in the middle of which all the voices stop in their tracks. It is in keeping with the aesthetic world of this album that the Hosanna II crashes into this gentle music, with the tenor singing L’ardant desir at full tilt."

~Jesse Rodin and Emily Zazulia
Source: CD booklet
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