Philly Enquirer, 30 September 2004

Posted on Thu, Sep. 30, 2004

From Cathedral to Computer
Obscure Renaissance Music

By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic

PRINCETON - While great cathedrals survive majestically from the 15th century into the 21st, most of the music heard within them has slept in libraries, and would continue to do so unless kissed back to life by an unlikely mechanical prince: a MIDI synthesizer.

Hear it happen on your PC.

First, call up http://www.princeton.edu/~rwegman/mass.htm. The amber-colored Web pages list 15th-century composers almost never sung or even mentioned, such as Gaspar van Weerbeke or Johannes Martini. Click the red ball to the left, and warm blankets of choral sound arrive in remarkably lifelike, computer-generated voices, weaving around one another with shifting shades of vocal color.

Beautiful as the music is, these Renaissance-era settings of the Roman Catholic Mass might never have been available to the public were it not for Rob C. Wegman, the associate professor of music at Princeton University who created the site and has translated 50 unheard scores into an ethereal though artificial sound - completely out of personal curiosity.

“I’m like a cat on a table that’s filled with delicious stuff, and I don’t know where to start,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I always wanted to know what that sounds like.’”

This unlikely marriage of music and technology is serendipitous. Written for unaccompanied voices, the music can become meaningless when transcribed for anything other than its chosen medium. Wegman’s realizations are both efficient and noninterventionist: The words of the Latin Mass are difficult to manage in MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) world, so the voices sing in a neutral “o” vowel sound. “It’s a miracle,” he admits, “that it works as well as it does.”

In approximating real performances, Wegman is way ahead of his colleagues, at least to judge from what’s available on the umbrella Web site http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/scores/sounds.html. There are 39 links to other MIDI sites, such as fragments of ancient Greek music from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Some sites haven’t been updated in years; because of primitive technology, the music often sounds like doorbells.

Wegman says he knew little about these six months ago when he started, with a NoteWorthy computer program, to key in the music, some from unpublished manuscripts. The computer program Finale offers sound “patches” that include the human voice.

Sitting at his computer, Wegman keys in a Mass by Jacob Obrecht (1450-1505); initially, the phrasing sounds mechanical. He goes back to NoteWorthy and hits the “legato” function. “I’m not a choir director, but I can make it sound a little better,” he says. He also blends the voices a bit. Each Mass requires two days of work. Lately, he has refashioned a few, previously realized Masses with slower, more contemplative tempos.

Churches were the performing arts centers of their day, which is why the core of most composers’ output from the 14th to the end of the 16th centuries was the Catholic Mass. Wegman’s specialty is the period from 1440 to 1520: It encompasses a burst of composing that includes one of the great composers of any era, Josquin des Pres, and roughly 500 Masses, most not commercially recorded. “You’re talking about 200 to 250 compact discs. It’s a lot of music,” he says.

Even in a better world, worthwhile pieces wouldn’t be recorded because their authors are unknown: The music, to put it crassly, has no marquee value. Some of these pieces have been poorly treated by posterity; their only known copies were discovered in recycled book bindings and subsequently pieced back together. Other pieces are by composers so obscure that their music might as well be anonymous, such as the mid-15th century’s Firminus Caron. Little is known about him; none of his music has been recorded. “His L’homme armé Mass is just sensational,” Wegman says. “In many cases, something that looks so simple on paper is just overwhelming in sound.”

Scholars often believe their score-reading abilities should be good enough that sites such as Wegman’s aren’t needed. And because all of the voices in Wegman’s realizations have the same tone quality, the ear has trouble picking out which voices are doing what, says New York University musicology professor Stanley Boorman. “But we’re hearing how the composer thought about sonority. And that’s interesting,” he says, “though I’m not sure what we’ll get out of it.”

What is heard on Wegman’s site is a provisional experience, but so, in theory, are all performances of music this remote. Though early-music figures such as conductor Paul McCreesh present Renaissance Masses in their original liturgical context, Wegman argues the 15th-century experience can’t be re-created.

“We wouldn’t want to get back to the mind-set of the 15th century - the sense of devotion, the outlook on life, the idea that music was meant to release the souls of people kept in purgatory. Not all of us are Catholics,” he says. “The marvel of the music is that not only did it deeply appeal to the 15th-century musical sensibility, but it can still do so today. The question is, what does the music need to be alive?”

One surprise is how consistently good the music on Wegman’s Web site is. Like Byzantine icons, Renaissance choral music was composed according to strict precepts; sometimes, the ear must search for signs of individual personality among the composers. But that strictness also ensures quality control.

Just as an experiment, Wegman composed his own Mass, Maria mater ad me venit, with authorship attributed to one Paullet Macarné from the manuscript LiverC Fab. 4. Yes, it’s a Mass based on two classic songs by the Beatles, “She Loves You” and “Let It Be.” Aside from its animated bass line, it could pass. “There’s something about the idiom of the time,” he says. “You could compare it to King James English: Everything will have some semblance of elegance.”

Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at 215-854-4907 or dstearns@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/david_patrick_stearns.