Spiritual Colors
by Anthony Esolen
I sometimes feel when I examine the habits and the works of people of the past—and often the not very distant past—that I've come upon a message from a different world. I don't mean that the people did what we do but went about it in a way we find hard to imagine. I don't mean, simply, that they had to have many practical skills of household and workshop that we no longer have, because we get our food and other goods by mass production. It's that their lives were steeped in spiritual colors that we cannot see, colors both human and divine. That is not to say that they were morally better than we are. Often they were worse. It is that they were more fully human, with all their glory and their shame, more obviously the creature made in the image of God.
In 1568, Felice Anerio, an eight-year-old boy, joined the choir of the Cappella Giulia, in Rome, to sing for Mass and for the daily office. There he came under the direction of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, perhaps the greatest composer of choral music who ever lived. It isn't that the boy Felice would be learning to sing what grownups sang on their own. Palestrina and the other composers specifically wrote for the unique voice of the boy: clear, pure, simple, without the mature vibrato and timbre of the woman's voice. In other words, you had artistic masterpieces that could not be made real without children, and they sang the most important part, the soprano leading in the melody and soaring above the voices of the grown men.
Anerio sang in that choir for nine years, learning not only to sing but also to lead others in singing, and to compose choral music of his own while he was still a teenager. Anerio eventually succeeded Palestrina as head of the choir, and was ordained a priest.
Two Choirs in Affirmation & Response
You can hear one of his motets, Venite ad me omnes, sung by the Westminster Choir and directed by Simon Preston, on a disk that features Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli, the Mass for Pope Marcellus—the great work whereby Palestrina showed that you could write polyphony of the most intricate and exquisite sort without losing the words in the confusion of sound. Anerio learned from the master in that regard, too.
The Venite ad me omnes is a motet for eight voices, that is, boy sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, in two choirs, allowing for a rich experience of affirmation and response, as if the choirs were competing with one another in power and feeling and joy, especially soprano "against" soprano and tenor "against" tenor. Sometimes one choir sings while the other is silent. Sometimes they sing the words as you do in a round, coming in at separate points. Sometimes they sing fully together, in fine eight-part harmony.
We can learn much from what Anerio did for this motet. Contemporary praise-song composers, from what I see, often string together a couple of adjectives describing God, sprinkle in a few biblical motifs, and shore up the lack of theological insight and poetic beauty with exclamation points: God, as one popular song has it, "ain't putting on the Ritz," because "he has thunder in his fitz," I mean, "fists." So time and progress ring in their changes.
But Anerio, not blessed with acoustic guitars and amplifiers, had to choose his words artfully, and fit the music to them. The words are all from Scripture, but their placement next to one another is profoundly illuminating.
The Texts & Their Settings
We begin with the verse from Matthew: Venite ad me omnes qui laborati et onerati estis, et ego reficiam vos, dixit Dominus—"Come to me all ye who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will refresh you, says the Lord." Anerio picks up the hint in the Latin verb reficere, which means in context that the Lord will relieve us of our burdens, but literally suggests refection, the restoring of what we have lost by our labor, or our sin. The sopranos, altos, and tenors of the first choir, coming in at different points, sing the opening words, venite ad me, but then all eight voices suddenly break in triumphantly with strong half-notes at omnes, all, because we are all in the same condition, all in need of the Lord's refreshment.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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