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Views from the Choir Loft

Sanctus & Benedictus • “Ave Maris Stella” (Victoria)

Jeff Ostrowski · June 5, 2018

UR PASTOR in the 1990s once said to me: “Jeff, I appreciate best those passages of Sacred Scripture with which I am most familiar.” Music is the same: we often most enjoy melodies that we’ve heard before, at least a few times. For this reason, great composers like Tomás Luis de Victoria (d. 1611)—who was a Catholic priest, just like Cristóbal de Morales—frequently based their Mass settings on tunes familiar to the congregation. However, the primary reason it was chosen to be sung at Symposium 2018 is its marvelous counterpoint.

Can you hear how he employs melodies from Ave Maris Stella hymn?

REHEARSAL VIDEOS for each individual voice and PDF score await you at #88751.

REHEARSAL VIDEOS for each individual voice and PDF score await you at #88749.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, we released the KYRIE from this Mass, and soon we’ll follow suit with the GLORIA. This Mass by Victoria was first published in 1576—meaning Fr. Victoria was still his twenties. The following is how Dr. Robert Stevenson, a great musicologist, compared Victoria’s setting to the Missa Ave Maris Stella of Fr. Morales:

ICTORIA—still in his twenties—shows none of the elder master’s adroitness at inventing original motifs that can recur as counterpoints to the plainsong hymn in such different movements as the “Patrem omnipotentem” and the “Et in Spiritum Sanctum”—or, over a still larger arch: in KYRIE I, the SANCTUS, and AGNUS DEI I. Morales’s great architectural gifts, displayed in this Mass and elsewhere, justly entitle him to comparison with Juan de Herrera; and it was just this talent that enabled him in his much longer Mass to unify disparate age-groups of masonry into a convincing and harmonious whole.

Victoria, who always chose to work on a smaller scale, did succeed, however, in leaving a much more genial and affable impression with his Mass. The very transposition of the hymn up a fourth throws the vocal quartet into lighter and brighter registers. His unwillingness to commit himself to any single technique, paraphrase or cantus firmus, also prevents his manner from ever becoming tedious. A comparison of the number of printed accidentals is not so conclusive as it may seem—Victoria having been the first Spanish composer to specify all, or nearly all, his required accidentals. But for what it’s worth, Victoria’s KYRIE movements contain eight or nine more accidentals than are to be found in the whole of Morales’s Mass. Above all, his harmonies can always be analyzed in a modern G-minor sense, whatever the key signature; whereas Morales’s harmonies, no matter how much ficta is applied, remain irretrievably modal in his Ave maris stella.

In conclusion, I must tell you a secret: Some readers won’t click those links above, and thereby forfeit the magnificent rehearsal videos for each individual voice. They’ll also avoid the special PDF scores which contain Solfège. This makes me sad.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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Jeff Ostrowski

About Jeff Ostrowski

Jeff Ostrowski holds his B.M. in Music Theory from the University of Kansas (2004). He resides with his wife and children in Los Angeles.—(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

Quick Thoughts

Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

“Chants closely related to the readings should, of course, be appropriately transferred for use with these readings. For pastoral reasons also there is an option regarding the chants for the Proper of Seasons: namely, as circumstances suggest, to replace the text proper to a day with another text belonging to the same season.”

— Ordo Cantus Missae (1971)

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