Tower Records is a thoroughly '90s company. It delivers quality merchandise at standard prices with occasional great sales. Its massive inventory holds everything current, and its computers can locate just about anything else. Its clerks are knowledgeable and friendly. It's part of today's world culture: one can drop in anywhere in the world--Picadilly Circus in London, Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, Clark Street in Chicago--and feel familiar comfort. Though rock music thumps through the main showroom, the classical section is a quiet haven.
Electronic recording is, of course, a modern invention, and being able to hear a piece whenever one wants is a modern choice. Through most of history the artistic performance was a unique experience. Handel would repeat a strong melody enough to impress it on an audience, who could then hum it on their way home; Bach would lift a popular melody from a cantata and use it with new words in an oratorio. The audience rarely heard a piece twice, and after one performance, much worthy music passed into oblivion.
After decades in which vinyl disks thinned and slowed from 78 to 45 to 33 1/3 RPM, with tapes trailing behind on large reels, 8-tracks, and then cassettes, the compact disc has come to dominate recorded music. The low cost of these discs, the sound quality, and the simplicity of CD players have fed a demand that has made much forgotten music available for the first time in centuries. Some of this music--known only to scholars and graduate students twenty years ago--has been part of Jesuit history.
The Gonzaga University Choir has recorded two CDs of sacred music from the Baroque to the contemporary periods, and a Christmas music CD is in the works.
Among classical composers, the biggest Jesuit name is Domenico Zipoli. He was born in Italy in 1688, and after studying under Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples, he moved to Rome in his early twenties. In 1716 he entered the Jesuit order in Spain, and the next year he left for the South American missions. The native peoples there had developed sophisticated musical talent, and a great deal of original Jesuit music, much of it by Zipoli, is preserved in archives in Bolivia. Zipoli died in 1726 in Argentina before being ordained a priest.
Zipoli's early Sonate d'Intavolatura appear on a number of discs (Excelsa Musica label, for example). One striking piece, an "Elevazione," appears orchestrated in a couple of Baroque collections with works of Pachelbel, Bach, Albinoni (Erato label, for example). His work is also featured heavily in a series of discs called Les Chemins du Baroque (Sur Mesure label), which present South American colonial music; other Jesuit composers are represented there too.
Through their schools and churches, Jesuits influenced some major composers. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was master of music from 1566 to 1571 at their Roman College (now the Gregorian University) in Rome. Their German College in Rome employed Tomas Luis de Victoria as master of music in 1573, a post Giacomo Carissimi assumed in 1629.
Carissimi's music embodied the Jesuit spirituality. Notes to accompany a recording of his Judicium Extremum ("Last Judgment," Erato label) connect Carissimi's composition style and Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises and their use of the imaginative appeal to the senses. The notes to his Lamento della Maria Stuarda ("Lamentation of Mary Stuart," Jecklin Disco label) point out his put-down of the English sense of law and associate his music with "the militant policy of the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation."
One pupil of Carissimi was Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian who moved to Paris and enjoyed the patronage of the court. He collaborated with Molière on a number of productions and was a successful popular entertainer. His work does not give much evidence of early association with the Jesuits in Rome, but the notes to his collection Petits Motets (Harmonia Mundi label) point out that in composing on Eucharistic themes he is emphasizing "one of the major themes of the Counter-Reformation." One piece in this collection is a setting of the Anima Christi, a prayer that is printed with and referred to in the Spiritual Exercises.
Carissimi's star pupil was Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Where the Italian Lully had adopted the French musical style, the Frenchman Charpentier brought an Italian style from Rome to Paris. Lully enjoyed more popular success in his day, but Charpentier had a significant following. The notes accompanying his "Jesuit Vespers" (Cascavelle label) quote a contemporary of Charpentier's saying that he was "the deepest and most knowledgeable of modern musicians . . . no doubt that is why the Jesuit Fathers of the Rue Saint-Antoine hired him as master of music."
Supported by members of the Bourbon family and named for the king's predecessor and patron saint, their splendid baroque church of St. Louis in Paris became a center of Catholic life in Paris in the middle of the 1600s. François de la Chaise, the king's confessor, was based there, as was Louis Bourdaloue, the court preacher, whose sermons occasioned traffic jams in the neighborhood. Charpentier composed occasionally for the Jesuits after 1680 and worked exclusively for them for a decade after 1688.
As with Carissimi, commentators suspect a connection between Charpentier and Jesuit spirituality. The notes that accompany Méditations pour le Carême ("Meditations for Lent," Harmonia Mundi label), for example, state that "Ignatius had proposed in his Spiritual Exercises a program for personal prayer based on meditation; perhaps that Jesuit source lay behind Charpentier's Meditations."
From earliest days, schools were a powerful part of Jesuit ministry. By the end of the 1500s the Jesuit college in Paris was the most distinguished school in the city; in 1683 it was renamed the Collège Louis-le-Grand after King Louis XIV. Theatrical productions played an important part in the Jesuit educational scheme. Producers and writers added music and dance to drama; after 1650 ballet was an integral part of Jesuit theater in Paris, and Charpentier composed music for a number of these productions.
Besides being patrons and producers, Jesuits entered the realm of classical music here in a backstage way. A number of texts into which music and dance were woven were written by Jesuit priests. In 1687 Louis-le-Grand performed Celsus Martyr, a three-act tragedy written by Fr. Pallu; accompanying this performance was a production with music by Charpentier and lyrics by Fr. Bretonneau. Into the play Saul, written by Fr. Pierre Chamillart, was woven a musical work, David et Jonathas, again by Charpentier and Bretonneau. Other texts for Charpentier's music probably have a Jesuit author.
Jesuits also provided subject matter for Charpentier, including his Oratorio in Honor of St. Francis Xavier (Arion label). Charpentier also has an oratorio on St. Francis Borgia, the ascetic Spanish duke who became the Jesuits' third superior general.
Other composers have taken Jesuits' texts and set them to music. Scholars suspect that a couple of François Couperin's compositions, such as the motet "Laetentur coeli" (Harmonia Mundi), have lyrics by an anonymous Jesuit. The English composer William Byrd used the words of Henry Walpole, SJ, in "Why Do I Use My Paper, Ink, and Pen?" (Lyrichord label) which expresses reaction to the martyrdom of Edmund Campion in 1581. And poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins have been set to music by Benjamin Britten in a collection with the very Jesuit title A.M.D.G. (Virgin Classics), by Sir Arthur Bliss (Chandos), and by Ned Rorem (Argo).
Legendary Jesuits have played their musical part. The most notable and most sinister of them is Rangoni ("a Jesuit") and his accomplices, Lavitski and Chernikovski ("Jesuits"), of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (various recordings); they are part of a scheme to place the False Dimitri on the Russian throne. Less sinister and less interesting is Prince Max-imilian in Leonard Bernstein's Candide (Deutsche Grammophon and other labels); the naive prince becomes a Jesuit and is appointed superior of the missions in Paraguay. St. Ignatius himself shows up (along with two St. Theresas and fifteen other saints) in the Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (Nonesuch). It would be hard to tell which of these is more fictional or less flattering.
Fr. Edward Schmidt, SJ, is Company magazine's business manager.
Among contemporary Jesuits on CD, the Austrian Hubert Dopf is a noted musicologist and director of the Hofkapelle in Vienna. Even before the recent surge in the popularity of chant, Dopf recorded three discs of Gregorian chant for Advent, for Christmas, and for various feasts (Philips). In the United States, the 250-member Santa Barbara Regional Choir performs under the direction of Sue Ann Pinner, assisted by Carroll Laubacher, SJ, who plays the organ; this choir has recorded a collection of Marian music (VQR).
A new edition of the nearly classic psalms of Joseph Gelineau, SJ, (see Company, Summer 1994, pp. 7Ð9) is available in a new recording (GIA label). And Jesuits John Foley, Robert Dufford, Robert Fabing, and other American liturgical composers have recorded their work (see Company, Summer 1984, Fall 1995, and pp. 18Ð19 of this issue).
Jesuit schools have made their mark in the recording world. The Flowering of English Song is a collection from Loyola University New Orleans (Centaur label). And the Elizabeth University in Hiroshima (see Company, Spring 1993) has issued a number of recordings of classical music.
Two young Jesuits in Manila provided music for a video series on Francis Xavier produced by Kuangchi Studio in Taiwan; Manoling Francisco wrote the music and some lyrics, Johnny Go wrote other lyrics (CD on Kuangchi label). And art scholar and patron Friedhelm Mennekes, SJ, of Cologne, Germany, performed voice narrative for a production of Sieben Psalmen by composers Marcus and Simon Stockhausen ("Seven Psalms," EMI Classics).
Until modern times, the written word and dots on lines were how music was recorded. Electronic recording makes a musical experience available over and over; radio, television, and video make that same music available all over the world.
The new media are not unqualified artistic triumphs; the same howling rock band can assault one on a train in Moscow or aboard a ferryboat in Shanghai or in a bar in Boston. But if bad music is often unavoidable, much good music, once lost, is now available. New composers and performers have a better chance to share their art with a world audience. And more psalms and hymns and inspired songs can bring people to prayer and to praise. And if those who hear it like it, they can play it over and over again.![[*]](../gifs/compquad.gif){kind=small}
Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Mon., January 27 1997