Interview, Rory McCleery on Vicente Lusitano

Last September an astonishing new album from the Marian Consort shed light on the largely neglected composer Vicente Lusitano, thought to be the earliest-recorded composer of African ancestry in the classical canon by some margin as well as being an influential music theorist whose legacy can be traced through much Renaissance music.

Very much in the vein of the deeply expressive, fluid polyphony of Josquin and his contemporaries, the music is significant not just for the background of its composer but for its technical accomplishment - to take an existing revered work and one-up it was a popular game among composers of the time and a way to show off their compositional skill, and Lusitano reveals himself to be a master.

I spoke to the Marian Consort's director Rory McCleery about what we do (and don't) know about Lusitano, and how his music combines sophisticated cleverness with a clear sense of devotional and emotional energy.

Vicente Lusitano seems to have fallen off the radar of history, with an 18th-century biography even accidentally erasing his mixed-race ancestry. He is completely absent even from recent Renaissance histories (musical and otherwise) that specifically focus on Black experiences. How was he rediscovered, and why did it take so long?

How his ancestry was omitted from the story is a very interesting and potentially contentious point. The historian in question, a Portuguese priest called Diogo Barbosa Machado, was compiling something called the Bibliotheca Lusitana - a huge encyclopedia of Portugal. And incidentally that flags up one of the other mysteries about Lusitano - we don't really knew who he was, because his name simply means "Portuguese". Machado, like so many historians of the time (and since), simply cherry-picked bits of information from other sources that he either couldn't or wouldn't fact-check.

So is there evidence of deliberate whitewashing in this encyclopedia?

I don't know, but it's very telling. One of his sources, which he gets quite a lot of detail about Lusitano from, is another manuscript by a man called João Franco Barreto, describing Lusitano as "pardo", which is a very common word for mixed-race people at the time in Portugal. And that itself was very common, because Portugal was so involved in the slave trade and it was therefore common to have a Portuguese father and an African mother.

But Machado just doesn't mention it. And whether that's just an omission or by design, from an unwillingness to value a composer and their work if they're not white, is hard to say. It's most likely that the reason Lusitano himself couldn't get any official positions in Portugal - other than an informal connection with the Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See in Rome - was because of his ethnicity. It's impossible to know whether that's an accidental or deliberate omission in the historical account, but it's easy to be too kind in viewing past history, and gloss over things.

How was he brought back into prominence?

It's not that he's been completely forgotten - people have been aware of him, certainly in academia - and there seems to have been a performance history particularly of Heu me Domine, which is a very unusual chromatic piece. That tends to have been treated more as a weird outlier, though, rather than people looking at Lusitano himself. It's the sort of piece that might be programmed alongside de Rore, Gesualdo and Luzzaschi as an illustration of innovative harmony in the sixteenth century. Other than a very small number of commercial recordings and YouTube videos of Heu me, Domine, that's about it. But Garrett Schumann's 2020 article in VAN Magazine inspired plenty of people, not just me; the BBC Singers recorded a couple of his pieces for a broadcast on Radio 3's Early Music Show in 2021, and Joe McHardy, who is the Director of Music at the Chapel Royal, has also been doing some work on Lusitano in conjunction with Garrett - with a view to eventually publishing a complete scholarly edition of the motets and recording some of them too.

Heu me Domine is so luridly chromatic as to evoke Gesualdo – a stark contrast from the rest of Lusitano’s output. Why is this piece so stylistically different?

It's from a theoretical treatise; it's not really a piece at all, it's more of an exercise, a proof of concept. Essentially Heu me Domine is Lusitano saying "what would happen if you made a piece of polyphony where each point of imitation was just a chromatic scale going up or down?" For its time it is extraordinary - there are examples of earlier or contemporaneous chromaticism, for example the Jacob Handl piece Mirabile mysterium, which is very chromatic, but that's to convey a sense of wonder and mystery in the music. Whereas Lusitano seems to have taken some words from the Responsory for the Dead which he thought might be vaguely suitable and fitted them to the music afterwards.

Jacob Handl's Mirabile mysterium, sung by La Main Harmonique.

So he doesn't have the same gripping back-story as Gesualdo, where the anguished chromaticism is sometimes ascribed to a guilty conscience after having murdered people?

No, he's not a tortured soul in any way, he's just a music theorist expanding his ideas about "what if"! But what I think is interesting is that connection with Gesualdo. There is a direct lineage; although he would never have admitted and publicly insisted the opposite, Vicentino adopts it in his style and he is then responsible for a Ferrarese style that then influences people like Luzzasco Luzzaschi and ultimately Gesualdo, who arrives in Ferrara as a result of his second marriage – at which point his compositional style changes almost entirely. The first two books of madrigals are so radically different from the stuff that comes later; Gesualdo throws himself head-first into this new musical style of chromaticism and the rest of his music stays like that.

The Hollywood version, or the Dan Brown version, would be Gesualdo coming across a copy of Heu me Domine and having a sudden conversion - but it certainly is the case that he went there and absorbed this style that had been developed by multiple musicians over time, but all stemming from Lusitano's experimental stuff that he had been doing in Rome in the middle of the century. Fifty years on, that had evolved into something else in Ferrara. There's a line of influence between the two.

Lusitano shows enormous deference to the recently-deceased Josquin des Prez, with various allusions incorporated into his own motets. Was he unusual in this, or was Josquin just such a dominating historical figure at that time that nobody could escape his shadow?

The legend of Josquin is probably at its most powerful at this point, with him having died in 1521 but his reputation having grown since then. In Seville, for instance, there is a collection of Marian music that was sung in the cathedral, where Josquin's music is very prominent. There's this quote from the Renaissance music theorist Francesco de Salinas all about Josquin, saying that his music is great but that some of his best pieces are the ones where people already know the tune! Those highly-celebrated motets and in particular Inviolata and Praeter rerum seriem are two examples he gives - and Josquin's Salve regina was also very widely known. We know a lot about parody Mass composition, which serves a practical purpose as well as a musical and intellectual one, in that if you are writing a lot of music for the Mass ordinary, and there aren't many obvious inspirations from the text, then you draw on a pre-existing source. And it also allows you to make a statement with the model you choose - that it's a great piece or that you admire the composer, and even that you want the intellectual challenge of reshaping somebody's music and one-upping them.

But there's increasing evidence of parody motet composition as well - which is what Lusitano is doing here. For instance there's a piece that's very well known throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth by Jean Mouton, Queramus cum pastoribus; throughout the sixteenth century there are motets by other composers setting the same words and using the musical material of Mouton's original, reshaping it in the style of what was contemporary at the time.

Jean Mouton's Queramus cum pastoribus, sung by the choir of the Sistine Chapel.

This is exactly what Lusitano does; he takes the original Josquin motets (indicating his own high opinion of Josquin) but he also wants to show off what he can do. That's what he does with all three of the Josquin-based pieces in his motet collection. With Inviolata he takes Josquin's five-part original, which has a strict canon in two voices in the middle of it, and he preserves that canon identically while also writing new music around it for six other voices instead of just three others. It's a bit like an aural kaleidoscope, refracting Josquin's music through a prism; you get this new texture but with the same canon at the centre, which is obviously a very clever thing to do and a real compositional challenge.

In Praeter rerum seriem he does the same thing - not a strict canon but you can hear Josquin's original material being transformed in the way that he writes, and you can hear the original monophonic song on which the Josquin is based as well. And here again he loves sticking in an extra voice or two; if Josquin does five voices Lusitano will do six, if Josquin does six he'll do seven. In the Salve regina, the Josquin original has one of the voices singing an ostinato made up of the first four notes of the Salve regina chant. So all the way through, one voice sings "Salve" on, say, G-F-G-C, and their part just consists of doing that every so often. But Lusitano decides not only to add an extra voice but to distribute the "Salve" quotations across all the voices. Every two bars or so, in each voice part, there's a quotation of those four notes, which in the very dense, tightly-woven polyphonic style Lusitano's writing in becomes almost overwhelming. It's a constant litany of Salve regina. And even that isn't enough for him; in the extra voice he adds, which is the baritone part, he has the entire chant as a cantus firmus, which is absolutely mind-blowing.

And the thing that makes it most amazing of all is that it's not just a clever, very worthy piece (of which there are plenty of examples from the period which are not, in fact, very good); all of this music is extraordinarily beautiful too, and you can enjoy it regardless of the underlying theory.

Your previous album, the EP Inviolata, juxtaposes not only Josquin and Lusitano but a new commission from Roderick Williams based on both. Can you tell us more about the links between the three works on that album?

One of the things we wanted to do at the beginning of our exciting new partnership with Linn Records was to announce it before the full Lusitano album, with this EP - it would be like one of those Renaissance triptych altarpieces where you fold out the sides and get the two other panels. Here the central panel is the Lusitano, and the historical reflections on either side, one from the past and one from our own time. All inspired by this lovely idea of musical echoes and links of inspiration between the Josquin and the Lusitano. It also came about through a project we were working on with Classical Remix to create something for a sound installation. That's what gave us the idea to ask Roderick Williams. I've known him for a long time and of course he's an amazing musician and a fantastic singer and composer, but his identity is very important to him too, even though he doesn't always talk about it. So we thought he'd be a great person to ask to write a piece reflecting both the Lusitano and the connections with the Josquin. There's that thread running through them, with the Lusitano as the connective tissue in the middle.

We also thought it would be nice to do the EP because Roderick's piece wouldn't necessarily fit on the full album and would also seem a bit strange stylistically - mixing that and a few Josquin motets in with the Lusitano wouldn't have made so much sense. So we thought it was better to keep it as a representative selection of Lusitano. It's by no means the whole motet collection - that would be about three discs' worth. But that's exciting in itself because it means that in the future there's still plenty of scope for people to record more Lusitano. We felt that presenting the three pieces together as an EP was a really nice thing as that kind of triptych.