Lauda Spirituale – Le Miroir de Musique

The lauda is one of those forms that music history tends to swallow whole, mentioning it briefly before rushing on to Dufay or Ockeghem or whoever comes next in the canonical procession. Baptiste Romain and his ensemble Le Miroir de Musique have decided, sensibly, that it deserves better.

And it does. Urgently.

The lauda — lauda spirituale, spiritual praise — has roots going back to the flagellant confraternities of thirteenth-century Italy, those unsettling processions of penitents who sang as they walked and bled. By the fifteenth century the form had shed most of its more alarming associations and found new champions in humanist poets like Feo Belcari and Leonardo Giustinian, men who brought to sacred vernacular song the same intensity of feeling they applied to classical texts. Giustinian in particular was a figure of genuine literary consequence — a Venetian nobleman who could write love poetry with one hand and meditations on the Passion with the other, and who apparently saw no contradiction in that.

What makes the lauda musically distinctive, and what Romain’s program illuminates with real intelligence, is its embrace of homorhythm at precisely the moment when the rest of Europe was going the other direction. While Ockeghem and his Franco-Flemish colleagues were spinning ever more elaborate contrapuntal webs, Italian lauda composers were writing music in which all the voices move together, syllable by syllable, so that the words — in Italian, not Latin — could be heard and understood by ordinary people sitting in a convent chapel or standing in a piazza. This was not naivety. It was a deliberate aesthetic and spiritual choice.

The program spans roughly a century, from Venetian sources of the 1420s through to Petrucci’s printed collections of 1507 and 1508. Petrucci — Ottaviano Petrucci, the Venetian printer who essentially invented the music publishing industry — made sure his lauda anthologies included works by Innocentius Dammonis, a composer who remains somewhat shadowy despite Petrucci’s evident enthusiasm for him. The Dammonis pieces here are plain, even severe, in their homophony, designed for convent use and making no apologies for their directness.

Le Miroir de Musique plays and sings with a transparency that suits the music exactly. There is no padding, no false warmth in the sound. When the voices lock into one of those clean homorhythmic cadences, you hear the snap of it — the way the texture suddenly simplifies and the text lands.

One of the program’s sharpest pleasures is the pair of contrafacta — pieces where sacred Italian texts have been set to pre-existing secular melodies. “Con gran fervor, Gesú, ti vo cercando” borrows the tune of “J’ay pris amours,” a song associated with Johannes Ghiselin and popular enough to have been borrowed by half of Europe. “Nessun piacere ho sanza te” draws on “Mon seul plesir,” attributed to the Englishman John Bedyngham, whose music circulated widely on continental manuscripts despite his having died around 1460 in relative obscurity. The effect is peculiar and moving — you keep hearing the secular song underneath the devotional words, like a palimpsest, and you wonder whether the original audiences heard it too, and what they made of the collision.

There is also a manuscript source from an unlikely place: the Codex Grey, now held in Cape Town, which found its way to South Africa through channels that remain imperfectly understood. It contains both vocal works — including the Good Friday meditation “Convertime o signore” — and instrumental fantasies, and Romain draws on it with evident care.

The program ends with Josquin. “O mater dei et hominis” is in Latin rather than Italian, but Romain’s decision to close with it makes sense: Josquin absorbed the lauda aesthetic as thoroughly as he absorbed everything else, and the piece sits at the intersection of the tradition’s simplicity and the high polyphonic art that surrounded it. It is a generous ending — expansive where much of the program has been austere.

The disc, made in the Church of Saint-Léger in France, gives the ensemble just enough acoustic space without prettifying anything. Romain has resisted the temptation, common in early music recordings, to make everything bloom. The sound here is clear-eyed and slightly spare, which is exactly right for music that was never meant to seduce.

This is a serious, quietly revelatory disc. Not a warm bath. An education.