*extremely late Renaissance voice* I PREFER 40-person motets, of course.
Next week I will be home in America with all of you darlings! HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU!
*extremely late Renaissance voice* I PREFER 40-person motets, of course.
Next week I will be home in America with all of you darlings! HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU!
Oh my god, mega nostalgia for being 17.
I love that I wasn’t the only one with this reaction.
Formally requesting more early music content on The Toast.
I love Palestrina.
I love that someone else makes that sentence ♥
Same.
PALESTRINA. <3 lord I love you all so very very much.
SPEM IN ALIUM IS NOT THE ONLY WORTHWHILE MOTET, MALLORY (also its cred hath been ruint by being on the 50 Shades soundtrack).
But maybe its cred was built up a bit by that art piece by Janet Cardiff where she set up 40 speakers, 1 to each voice, to sing it? It was also cool because you could hear the singers chatting between the song’s end and its restart. Such adorable little kids in the boy soprano section!
I went to this at the Cloisters in New York a couple of years ago–it was so great! I did think they could’ve given Thomas Tallis a little more credit for writing the thing, though.
Hmmmm… I felt like the Cleveland Art Museum did well with that, but maybe that recollection is colored by the fact that my partner at the time was a composer and we just referred to it as “the Tallis thing”.
I saw/heard it in Cleveland too and loved it, without a composer partner. So perhaps your recollection is colored but I agree with it anyway!
Yeah, it’s hard for its cred to get too damaged when it’s still a truly remarkable work by Tallis.
Tallis always, Tallis forever.
Yes! I saw (heard) it in Atlanta at the High Museum a couple years ago, and as a former choir singer and former sound designer and music fan in general it made me cry because it was so beautiful. Tallis has been my fall-asleep music since then (medieval/renaissance vocals in general are my favorite falling-asleep music).
I saw it in San Francisco and it was amazing. Especially once I heard the talking in between takes. Alas, I only got to listen to it 8 times before my “friend” made me leave. I would have loved to sit in front of each speaker.
ALL INTELLECTUALLY SUPERIOR INDIVIDUALS PREFER 40-VOICE MOTETS.
So basically a very old-school Anglican church choir classically trained my voice over the ten-year period from the time I was nine years old until I went to college, and we used to sing Palestrina *all the time,* and I have not sung so much as a hymn in five years and my voice is *incredibly rusty*, and there is still nothing more comforting to me than this music.
I was in an old-school Anglican choir from about 8-15, with a little bit of Palestrina. From 16-19 I was in a minimum or five or six choirs (depending on whether you counted the “madrigal group” where we mostly just sight read and gossiped) and there was soooo much early music. The suspension on the last page of the Agnus Dei in Byrd’s four-part or five-part mass* is basically my main memory of sixth-form.
* I’m a soprano: I don’t need to know how many other people are singing.
“I’m a soprano: I don’t need to know how many other people are singing.”
This made me die! I’m a dramatic soprano so choir directors usually put me with the altos unless they need a richer, fuller sound in the soprano part for a particular piece; this means I get to experience the trash talking from both sides, and it is awesome.
“Next week I will be home in America with all of you darlings!”
I’m now horrified to discover that Canada has been annexed. 🙁
You’ll be even more horrified if that orange-faced poltroon somehow manages to win the election this year.
I don’t envy the United States this year. I know Trudeau isn’t perfect, but when I look at the choices you have…
I so envy you your Trudeau.
~demoralized USian
Ooh, I have two Spem in Alium stories: I once sang it at this crazy wedding where the mother of the groom had pledged him to the Virgin Mary after he didn’t die at birth (apparently there was some danger of this?) and as a result she had saved all this money for the wedding, enough to hire 40 singers + organ on top of all the regular wedding stuff (there may also have been trumpets? my memory is a little hazy) AND they rented portable air conditioning for the church, one of those big old Catholic churches in the city, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Also multiple-page programs with color covers and tassels. I felt sorry for the bride. I suspect she had very little say in the ceremony.
Also: my college glee club sings it every year at Reunions. Hey, come on out and pick a part and hack through a 40-voice motet! No big! I love it.
THAT IS AMAZING. AMAZING. Both of those stories are amazing.
Hiring forty singers: not a huge problem. Hiring eight each of SATBB, all strong enough to take a part alone: considerably more impressive.
I had always vaguely wondered how The Tallis Scholars, normally a much smaller group, managed to record this, so I finally checked my CD: they hired 27 extra singers.
Ah so!
Finding 8 true basses must have been a nightmare, FFS.
I love Palestrina and only know of him thanks to a Hermione/Snape fanfic I read ages ago.
Aha! Someone else read Roman Holiday on witchfics.org! Sadly the site seems to have died.
This is currently making my day.
Many people in my choir are known to start chanting SPEM SPEM SPEM SPEM in the manner of the Monty Python Spam Song, if Spem in Alium is mentioned, alluded to, or even possibly relevant. Motets are so great.
Heh, I used to be in a choir where someone would sneak off to the piano and play the first four bars of Thou Little Babe, and we’d just go and our director would look kind of alarmed and then would resignedly start conducting.
Nerd alert but still: if you can, listen to the Palestrina via a streaming service (e.g., Spotify has the recording by the Hilliard Ensemble that Mallory linked to), and, at the same time, read along on something like Bible Gateway, where you can display the Canticum Canticorum parallel in Latin and English. That way, if you lose your place on the recording, it’s much easier to find it again, and the text is so wonderful it would be a shame to miss out on.
Obligatory book reference: A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (amazing story which first made me want to read the Song of Songs. “As terrible as an army with banners” – aah!)
Aaaaaaaaah, I loved that collection of short stories, and am made sad by how much I hate everything of Byatt’s that i have since read.
Exquisite! Thanks be to Toast for bringing an hour of peace to an otherwise frustrating workday. <3 May all your suspensions resolve beautifully this week, and any deceptive cadences lead eventually home.