Interview, Daniel Trocmé-Latter and Patrick Allies on The Mysterious Motet Book of 1539

Part-books - precious compilations of music, either laboriously hand-copied or typeset using the new technology of the printing press - are an important element of early music performance practice and scholarship. They often turn up in improbable places - sometimes hiding for centuries in forgotten annexes of university or cathedral libraries.

But a new recording from Siglo de Oro shines a light on music from a music collection whose origin is so unexpected that it almost seems to have been dropped by a careless time-traveller - a collection of Catholic sacred music in Latin, coming from freshly Protestant Strasbourg. The Mysterious Motet Book, then, isn't a newly-discovered novel by Umberto Eco; it's a selection of music that ended up the "wrong" side of both the Alps and the theological gulf of the Reformation.

I spoke to director Patrick Allies and musicologist Daniel Trocmé-Latter to explore the mystery further - how the book ended up in Strasbourg, how its contents dodged the attentions of religious censors, and what makes the music so special.

This album – sounding like an artifact from a magic-realist novel – raises more questions than it answers. How did the mysterious book come down to us?

DTL: I don't think there's been a time when we've lost it, as such - it's not a recent rediscovery in that sense. Scholars have been writing about the Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimae (Strasbourg, 1539) since at least nineteenth century. It's been known about. Four complete copies survive to the present day.

PA: We don't know how long the print run would have been, though, presumably?

DTL: No, we don't know how many copies were printed in the first place. My suspicion is that there weren't very many but it's hard to know. The only thing you can really do is to compare the number of extant copies of this to Peter Schöffer's other musical prints from his time in Strasbourg, and it's broadly similar.

Presumably the publisher, Peter Schöffer the Younger, intended to use his base in (Protestant) Strasbourg to market this collection of Milanese Latin motets to Catholic Northern Europe as a whole – do we have any indications of how well this business venture played out? Did the motets enter the repertoire north of the Alps?

DTL: I think it fell relatively flat for him, but that's not necessarily to say that the pieces themselves weren't sung. In fact, some of them were sung a lot. I've been comparing all the concordances of the motets and there are a lot more than I expected, many of which post-date the 1539 published anthology. In terms of the distribution of the book itself, we have extant examples from Augsburg, Bologna, Verona and Münich. So I suspect that some copies of it did get sent back to Italy - which would make sense considering that that's where the music originally came from - and certain pieces were likely copied out and sung in churches all over Europe.

There's also an inventory from the court chapel inventory of the Palatine Count Ottheinrich in 1544 which mentions a manuscript containing a lot of the same pieces as appear in Schöffer’s collection, including many in the same order. We don't have the manuscript itself but the index lists it as being in the collection. So we know the music travelled around a bit, at least within Germany and Italy and very likely further afield.

Given that Milan had its own music printers, is there any indication of why Hermann Matthias Werrecore decided to send the motet collection hundreds of miles north to Schöffer in the first place, rather than publishing it locally?

That's a good question. I have my theories - I won't make you wait entirely for the book to come out on those! I think Schöffer might have done a bit of digging - knowing that he wanted to publish a set of motets, he was asking around to see who could contribute to it. There is no evidence that he went to Italy at that time, nor that Werrecore visited Germany, so there must have been some third party involved to introduce the two of them.

I'm even beginning to suspect that there was some kind of international, inter-confessional network of musicians and publishers who were in communication with one another, across Italy, the Low Countries, Germany - there's not yet much hard evidence to support it but that's my suspicion.

Not dissimilar to the Hanseatic links of culture and trade that Gawain Glenton explored in his Music in a Cold Climate album a few years ago?

Yes, possibly the same sort of thing. It's difficult to be sure.

Is there any significance in the fact that the motets are all in five voices, rather than more or fewer?

PA: In a sense it's a bit of a practical thing - it hangs together very nicely as a set of partbooks. If you're going to print five partbooks I suppose it makes sense to make the most of that.

In terms of the texture that you get, it's very singable for a modern choir - you tend to have voice-parts that fit into what we have today. Generally soprano, alto, double tenor and bass. Occasionally we had to ask Daniel to shift things up or down for us, but by and large they all fitted that framework.

So in addition to being in five parts, are they mostly the same five voices?

PA: There's actually a bit of variety, and we've tried to include some of that on the album - there's one piece in particular, Phinot’s Exsurge Domine, which has no bass part. No matter where we moved that it was never going to fit a "normal" choir so we decided to embrace the oddness of it and sing it as SAAAT. It gives quite an intensity, with those three alto parts operating in a similar zone in the middle.

DTL: There are quite a lot of pieces where you have three parts in the middle - altos or tenors - with a similar range, plus one high voice and one low voice. That seems to be the uniting factor.

Are there other stylistic traits common to the motets in the book beyond the range of voices, or are they pretty varied?

PA: There's not a lot else that really connects them; it definitely feels like a collection that has someone has put together with a view to presenting a variety of different approaches. Although the composers are often writing for these five voices, they use them very differently. Some have a cantus firmus, some have a different scoring, some have quite a bold and dissonant approach to harmony.

The exciting thing for me was discovering someone like Johannes Lupi, and the richness of the harmonic colours that he fits into his setting. The scene isn't stolen just by the famous names in the collection.

Given the variety of voicings, does that mean that some church choirs would have been unable to perform some of the motets due to not having the right combination of singers?

PA: Daniel might not approve of my flight of fancy here, but I wonder about them being used in the home, rather than liturgically. Having a range of clefs in your book, for whoever happened to be available on a given day, would be useful - if you'd decided to sing a Latin motet, it was helpful to have various options. One piece of evidence in favour of this is that in theory singing Latin in church wasn't permitted in Strasbourg.

DTL: There's always that possibility, of these being sung in a domestic setting. In terms of church, yes, it's certainly the case that you couldn't sing Latin polyphony in Strasbourg in church at this time.

Maistre Jhan’s double setting of the Lord’s Prayer plus Ave Maria seems to have snuck under the Protestant censors’ radar by being titled simply Pater Noster on the contents page. How common was it for composers to combine these two texts into a single piece?

DTL: In spoken contexts these two prayers would often have gone together, for example in the context of the Rosary. In terms of music - Josquin does it, and I think this practice probably starts with him. He publishes a setting of Pater Noster and Ave Maria together, and then other composers start to decide that this is a good idea. In terms of the concealment of the "Catholic bit" of the piece, the Ave Maria, in the index, there's evidence of that happening in a lot of the motets; there are quite a few that have Marian elements, either undertones or in some cases quite clear overtones. But the titles given on the contents page are always short enough that if you were to just open the book and have a quick look, you wouldn't notice that they were so Catholic. There's one by Jhan du Billon, Postquam impleti sunt dies purgationis Mariae, ["And when the days of Mary's purification were completed", connected with the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary], but it's just listed as Postquam impleti sunt so you'd need some prior knowledge of the text to understand that it was a Marian text.

Even so, it's quite bold - it's hiding almost in plain sight!

DTL: Yes, and it's interesting that this was Schöffer’s last musical publication and he did leave Strasbourg quite soon after. We don't know why, but we could speculate that the contents of this anthology might be something to do with it. Was he "encouraged" to leave because he was publishing this sort of music?

PA: It strikes me, too, that this publication arrives at such an unsettled time. Publishing something like this gives the sense that maybe things could have gone differently in the 1540s, could have gone another way than they did. It's interesting that John Calvin arrives in Strasbourg about a year before this. It must have felt very unclear what the future would hold - maybe the motets were part of that.

DTL: By that time Schöffer had already published some polyphonic settings of the Magnificat, and a few other Lutheran collections of music. And Strasbourg was starting to move back towards the Lutheran fold, having started right at the Reformed (Swiss) end of the spectrum. So it may well be that Schöffer was hedging his bets on a swing towards liberal Lutheranism in the city - this was mostly the sort of music that could be sung in Lutheran churches without much trouble, so he may have decided to just give it a go and see how it turned out.

Although supplied to Schöffer from Milan, many of these works are by Flemish composers, who were employed not only in Italy but also in Iberia. Why was there such a widespread demand for composers from Flanders?

DTL: This practice seems to have started in the fifteenth century with Italian courts, competing with each other for the best musicians. The musicians of the Low Countries and the Burgundian territories just had the reputation - for whatever reason - of being the best. This migratory pattern south continues for about a hundred years.

PA: It's certainly possible that the training they were getting in what's now Belgium and the Netherlands was just superior to what you'd get anywhere else. It's definitely common to see singers who have spent time in places such as Bruges ending up singing in the Papal Chapel or for Italian dukes. In a way they were the premiership footballers of their day; as today one might say "we need some players from Spain if we're going to get this English team playing at the top level", they were just seen as superior.

How absolute was the ban on Latin music in newly-Protestant Europe? Were there regions or periods where some of these works might have managed to be heard in Protestant worship despite their Catholic pedigree?

DTL: Yes - this ban on singing in Latin is a very localised phenomenon. The thing about this time period is that there was no universality, really. The Reformation had only been going a couple of decades. So what you see is lots of areas in Europe doing slightly different things, and they write to each other: "Are you doing x?" "Are you letting y happen?" "We're not allowing vestments." “We've got rid of all the choirs but we're introducing vernacular psalm-singing." Mainstream Lutheran areas were definitely still allowing Latin polyphony - Wittenberg, for example. Somewhere like Nürnberg on the other hand would have been similar to Strasbourg; there's no evidence of this kind of singing happening there at that point - though things are changing all the time. And this is perhaps why Schöffer was hedging his bets - not necessarily in the hope that this music could be sung in Strasbourg itself, but because he knew that other such anthologies were being published in places like Wittenberg and Nürnberg, and thought it was a bandwagon that he wanted to jump on.

PA: It's evidence, in a way, for their kind of pan-European mindset. It was worth Schöffer's while to get these motets from Italy. And that demonstrates that he's not thinking just in terms of whether he can sell them down the road, but thinking about the bigger market that's out there.

Daniel's book on this topic, The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant city, Catholic music, is due out in the summer of 2023 from Boydell & Brewer.