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Anniversaries and memorial days are celebrated as they come.
It doesn't always happen like this year that two great musicians who seem like distant shadows to us because they died 500 or 400 years ago are still very close today.
Josquin Desprez is the name of one, Michael Praetorius the other.
Somehow their music sounds forever, spacious, calm, voices entwined in long arcs.
Carries people who have fallen back on themselves, listen inward, looking for contemplatives through the Corona year 2021.
It is vocal music, the oldest music of all.
She borrows the human body as an instrument: the vocal cords are the generators, the head is the resonance chamber, the lungs the bellows.
Several people singing give these manifestos, blown by the wind of history, more size, abundance, complexity, dignity and persuasiveness.
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But then this tangible, clear music immediately becomes abstract, although it serves.
Because she invokes the belief that the people of the late Renaissance and the early Baroque period would like to make life easier on earth by invoking a higher power.
They may be called God.
But we don't have to.
We can only be impressed by the clear, truly harmonious proportions of these tones floating upwards in the Gothic cathedrals, by their perfect beauty.
We can chill, we'll be carried away.
It can be an acoustic trip - in the name of the Queen of Heaven, a blessing father, a sacrificed son.
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“Josquin is the master of marks;
They have to do what he wants. ”Martin Luther already spoke full of praise about the Franco-Flemish, naturally Catholic composer and singer, who was born between 1450 and 1455 and died on August 27, 1521 on record.
He lived a truly European life in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, maybe Burgundy.
His remarkable work includes 19 complete masses, individual ordinarium movements, 90 motets, 70 secular works and a few instrumentals.
His name in the Sistine Chapel
Desprez was listed as the singer of the papal chapel for years.
If you are lucky enough to be allowed to go to the Sistine Choir, you can stroke the name carved into the wall there (by him?).
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Josquin Desprez, the abstract, and later also the expressive, the master of combinatorial and decorative counterpoint, especially in the canon, he is an alien quantity.
Often melancholy or elegiac.
But nevertheless his music envelops us comfortingly, calms us, is close to us.
He was one of the first musicians whose fame was so great during his lifetime and also reverberated beyond his death that his works continued to be printed posthumously.
The work of this vanished and yet present master is the basis of Western music.
On the foundation of this artfully branching polyphony of Desprez, it could bloom wonderfully creatively and bear a lot of rich fruit.
The simultaneity of this music, the distant and the immediate, the mirror as a fountain of the past, into which we look and yet - vaguely indeed, in the Renaissance - see ourselves, at least our feelings and empathies, that is what makes these sounds so relevant .
Michael Praetorius, actually Schulteis, born on February 15, 1571 near Eisenach, died on the same day 50 years later in Wolfenbüttel, worked as a composer, organist, court conductor and scholar at various dioceses and courts in Central Germany.
He led a life that was more anchored in the now, to do with the concerns of daily life.
Praetorius, just as Desprez could offend a self-confident creative who insisted on his worth, left behind a large number of church compositions of various kinds, but also secular dances and musicological writings.
Eight of his pieces can be found in the evangelical hymnbook, the most famous being his four-part setting of the Christmas carol "Es ist ein Ros sprung".
While the older Desprez appears stricter, slimmer, more monodic in its layout, Praetorius draws on the abundance of polyphony.
Up to 20 voices grow and sprout into an increasingly dense, admittedly still audible tonal weave, definitely influenced by the Italian manner of sounding at the time.
They wanted to make their world tangible
Although he never left Germany, he was universally educated and used the communication channels of his time to at least study the grades of the leading colleagues from the south.
The chants of the older Desprez seem to persist, those of the younger Praetorius have more urgent energy and freshness, they attack and sometimes jump at the listener.
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"Lux in tenebris" - "Light in the dark" - their time.
So both wanted to make their world tangible and endurable.
Of course they composed very differently, but for us very late born listeners their music is quite similar.
Simply because both of them draw extreme from the word, making it wrinkle-free and without superfluous embellishment, also giving it a tonal meaning.
The music does not serve the text, but it chisels it out with greater contrast, like the angular Gothic versus the softer Romanesque.
Likewise, they left behind complicated melisms and ancient cadences.
Even for us, your music is pure beautiful sound.
And maybe it is precisely the temporal distance to this music that allows us to experience the wonderfully artificial, yet directly touching element of its constitution. Which forces us to concentrate, to mediative wandering. This is something very strong and beautiful in these pandemic times and on these passion days.