Music by Palestrina in Alentejo

This morning I presented a paper on the circulation of Palestrina’s music in the South of Portugal during the first half of the eighteenth century at the Congress “Web of Knowledge” held at the University of Évora. This reminded me of writing a post with a playlist from the musical material available on YouTube of the works presented.

Although I always try to include a sound excerpt of the music I talk in papers, yesterday’s was a 40-second track of a brief but beautiful motet titled Pueri Hebraeorum portantes. There is much more to listen from this and other works. The motet Pueri Hebraeorum portantes comes from Palestrina’s 1584 Motectorum liber secundus and was copied in a 1735 choirbook for the Ducal Chapel at Vila Viçosa (in the video the motet appears associated with the plainchant antiphon Hosanna Filio Israel, which is not part of the polyphonic work).

In the Vila Viçosa’s early eighteenth-century sources there is preserved anonymously a polyphonic mass identified in the 1960s as the Missa Aeterna Christi munera by musicologist Manuel Joaquim. This paraphrase mass based on the hymn with the same incipit was printed in the 1590 Missarum liber quintus.

We find other small-scale works such as two four-voice hymns (Pange lingua and Vexilla Regis) and three other motets: the beautiful six-voice (SSATTB) O Domine Jesu Christe from the 1569 Liber primus motettorum; the five-voice (SAATB) Dominus Jesus in qua nocte from the 1572 Motettorum liber secundus; and the eight-voice Fratres ego enim accepi that survives in the 1614 print of the collection titled Cantus ecclesiasticus officii maioris hebdomadae edited by G. Guidetti.

There was also two manuscript copies (from Évora and Elvas cathedrals) titled Compendium Missarum copied by Cassiano López Navarro (succentor at the Royal Chapel, Madrid) probably in during the 1730s That was made by the four-voice antiphons Asperges me and Vidi aquam (of doubtful attribution), the Missa Brevis, Missa Iste Confessor, a Missa Sexti Toni (attributed to Palestrina), the Missa Aeterna Christi munera and the Missa Emendemus in melius (the video is in an early post)