beneath the rain, between the maps: Archive

“It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things— a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring— with immense, even startling power.” —Raymond Carver (via libraryland)

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (via liquidnight)

Apr 28, 201190 notes

#italo calvino #quotes

Apr 28, 201119 notes

#Jonny Greenwood #radiohead #sweater

Dum transisset Sabbatum John Taverner

John Taverner, “Dum transisset Sabbatum”

Conducted by Peter Phillips and performed by the Tallis Scholars

From what is probably one of my favorite “collections,” it’s almost three hours’ worth of Renaissance-era music. And this is probably Taverner’s best-known motet. Here is some more information on Renaissance motets because I think it’s interesting.

From Wikipedia:

The name of the motet was preserved in the transition from medieval to Renaissance music, but the character of the composition was entirely changed. While it grew out of the medieval isorhythmic motet, the Renaissance composers of the motet generally abandoned the use of a repeated figure as a cantus firmus. Guillaume Dufay was a transitional figure in this regard; he wrote one of the last important motets in the medieval, isorhythmic style, Nuper rosarum flores (1436), and written to commemorate the completion of Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome in the Cathedral of Florence.^[ During this time, however, the use of cantus firmi in works such as the parody mass tended to stretch the cantus firmus out to great lengths compared to the multivoice descant above it. This tended to obscure the rhythm supplied by the cantus firmus that had been apparent in the medieval isorhythmic motet. The cascading, passing chords created by the interplay between multiple voices, and the absence of a strong or obvious beat, are the features that distinguish medieval and renaissance motet styles.

Instead, the Renaissance motet is a polyphonic musical setting, sometimes in imitative counterpoint, for chorus, of a Latin text, usually sacred, not specifically connected to the liturgy of a given day, and therefore suitable for use in any service. The texts of antiphons were frequently used as motet texts. This is the sort of composition that is most familiarly designated by the term “motet,” and the Renaissance period marked the flowering of the form.

In essence, these motets were sacred madrigals. The relationship between the two forms is most obvious in the composers who concentrated on sacred music, especially Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose “motets” setting texts from the Canticum Canticorum, the biblical “Song of Solomon,” are among the most lush and madrigal-like of Palestrina’s compositions, while his “madrigals” that set poems of Petrarch in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary would not be out of place in church. The language of the text was the decisive feature: if it’s Latin, it’s a motet; if the vernacular, a madrigal. Religious compositions in vernacular languages were often called madrigali spirituali, “spiritual madrigals.” Like their madrigal cousins, Renaissance motets developed in episodic format, with separate phrases of the source text being given independent melodic treatment and contrapuntal development; contrapuntal passages often alternate with monody.