Ordinary time
A few Sundays ago, my parish church celebrated the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the choir chanted the Salve Regina, the seasonal Marian antiphon, after mass. It was our first time singing prayers to Our Lady at her shrine after a year and a half of silence. I was glad about it, but also struggling to focus. As with other things I've been able to return to now that the pandemic has somewhat subsided, it turned out that I didn’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. I was just muddling through it.
Marian antiphons—devotional hymns to the Virgin Mary, originally numbering in the hundreds in the Middle Ages—are appointed in a seasonal cycle of four in modern usage, and the Salve Regina is used in this current season from Trinity to Advent, which takes up almost half the calendar year and is sometimes called “ordinary time” (referring to the ordinal numbering of the Sundays). This season has an indefinite, in-between quality to me. After the life-upending revelations of Jesus’ Resurrection, his Ascension, and Pentecost, what is there to do? The only answer is to go on with the rest of life—so often "mourning and weeping in this vale of tears," in the words of the hymn. I’ve found it appropriate to try to return to supposedly normal life during “ordinary time,” living somewhere new, looking for a job, dealing with minor trials, wondering, as always: What now?
After I got home from mass, I listened to Poulenc’s setting of the Salve Regina, an old standby for me. Poulenc set most of the text in short, angular musical phrases separated by brief silences, characteristically for his choral writing. It’s the silences that I find most moving here. Silence in sacred music has a range of meanings, and often it evokes some aspect of the God who lies beyond words: mystery, transcendence, the peace which passes all understanding. But in this Salve Regina, the silence is a true void. On the words “ad te clamamus” (“to thee do we cry”), the topmost vocal line rises from and falls back into nothing: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In this short hymn text, some version of the word “exile” appears twice; to emphasize the concept, Poulenc repeats the word “exsilium” three times, the third time with a high piercing G-flat. We are exiled children of Eve, and our present liturgical season represents this long exile, this state of privation, when God in the flesh has departed and has yet to return. But crucially, our exile is not permanent, which is how we can speak of what comes “post hoc exsilium,” or even utter any prayer at all. What am I doing during this time (in the pandemic, in between jobs, in ordinary time), which so often feels like a void? I go to church, I pray, I more or less get on with life.
Now for something new (to me): a late-15th- or early-16th-century setting of the Salve Regina by Robert Wylkynson.
This piece has what I think of as as the most distinctive characteristics of pre-Reformation English choral music: it has a large number of vocal parts (nine), including some very high boy-soprano parts, and it's extremely elaborate and extremely long. (Part of the length is due to the inclusion of textual interpolations known as "tropes.") There's a little more information about the piece from Cantus Firmus, an early music publisher; apparently each of the voices corresponds to one of the nine orders of angels.
Part of what's remarkable to me about this piece is the sense of large-scale structure over its 16-minute duration. There's a big, majestic cadence on the first word "salve," and the piece is satisfyingly rounded out by a final "salve" not in the original hymn text. Individual sections often begin with three or four voices before growing to the full set of nine, providing some striking and appreciated textural contrasts. I've found some pre-Reformation English choral music complex to the point of impenetrability on first listen—and it's not that I have anything against music that requires careful repeated listening, but this Salve Regina is a little more immediately rewarding.