Our programme offers a vivid snapshot of the type and range of music for Saint Katherine available in England in the early-to-mid fifteenth century, in the heyday of the first maturity of English polyphony, as also of the still-developing alabaster tradition. Our centrepiece is the Mass for three voices by Walter Frye (d1475) composed on the plainsong Nobilis et pulchra, the first responsory at matins on Katherine’s feast (25 November). The tenor voice carries a rhythmicized version of this generally low-lying chant, and is complemented by an elegantly shaped discantus line (sung by altos) and a freely composed contratenor line (sometimes working melodically as a kind of second, but lower, melodic part, sometimes as a neatly devised contrapuntal adjunct). Despite differences of detail, the overall approach and effect are broadly similar to the kind of writing found in the anonymous Missa Quem malignus spiritus (recorded by The Binchois Consort on Music for Henry V and the House of Lancaster).
The Frye Mass movements are offset and enriched by a variety of motets and chants by Dunstaple and others, and an individual anonymous Mass movement of earlier date—a setting of the Gloria on another famous Katherine responsory chant, Virgo flagellatur. This work, which survives incomplete in a Cambridge manuscript (just its tenor and around two-thirds of its contratenor remain), has been reconstructed for this recording by Philip Weller. Its responsory tenor is also partially shared with the glittering motet En Katerine solennia, based on the chant’s verse ‘Sponsus amat sponsam’. The style of this grand isorhythmic piece and the text of its antecedent chant (‘The bridegroom loves the bride’) encouraged Manfred Bukofzer to suggest that it may have been composed for the wedding in 1420 of Henry V and Katherine de Valois. Whatever the occasion, it seems safe to suggest that the genesis of this work, housed in the royal ‘Old Hall’ choirbook, hails back to a royal occasion of substantial pomp and circumstance and high dynastic significance.
The same can surely also be said of Dunstaple’s grandly conceived motet Salve scema sanctitatis, likewise fashioned on systematic repetitions of a portion of the Virgo flagellatur chant. The choice here fell on the section of chant setting ‘Cantant celi agmina laudes’ (‘The heavenly hosts sing praises’), hence joining the singers’ praise of the martyr saint with that of the heavenly choirs whose company she was destined to share. The more intimate, gentle tone of the same composer’s Gaude virgo Katherina would surely have fitted it ideally to votive devotion before an image of the saint, probably in a side chapel.
Likewise at the more modest end of the musical scale stand the two Mass movements by ‘Driffelde’, putatively the ‘Robert Dryffelde’ who was a vicar-choral of Salisbury Cathedral from 1424 to 1468. Though not specifically dedicated to St Katherine, the two movements, which have much material in common, are based on a responsory and verse for the feast of a virgin, and hence are certainly applicable to devotions to our featured saint. Finally, with the settings of the two foundational chants Nobilis et pulchra and Virgo flagellatur in the simple, improvised idiom of faburden, we offer a taste of the kind of basic, formulaic chant-based idiom that would surely have been the most frequent and familiar form of polyphony to the experience of fifteenth-century worshippers.
The cult of Saint Katherine may no longer be practised so widely in the West, but it remains important in the Orthodox East (where she is still venerated as one of the Great Martyrs and a powerful Holy Helper), most especially on Sinai itself. And so her presence lives on, not just in narratives and prayers but above all in visual images of many kinds—in both the Western pictorial and the Eastern iconic tradition. Her music, too, can conjure up in poetry and inspiration what her story may lack in historical certitude. It offers us—not least in combination with precisely those many images—a perhaps fleeting and only momentary object lesson in poetic vividness and poignancy: something transient, but all the same eloquent and repeatable.
Andrew Kirkman & Philip Weller © 2018
