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• Presten, Jørgen: 2 chorale settings

Presten, Jørgen: 2 chorale settings

for 6 instruments.

These two pieces come from MS 1872 of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, a collection compiled around 1500 by Georg Heyde, a court trumpeter there. This source is one of the earliest to give indications of instrumentation: a few parts are assigned to sackbuts, crumhorns and cornetts respectively.
Jørgen Presten, who may have originally come from the Netherlands, was one of the main court composers at Copenhagen. Nineteen pieces by him have survived, all in the Copenhagen manuscript, consisting of six Latin motets, ten German hymns and three instrumental canons. He died of the plague in 1553.
Presten´s hymn settings have sometimes been dismissed as rather primitive, but this is probably because they have been looked at from the point of view of a cappella music: the counterpoint is quite unsophisticated, and lacking in clever imitative passages. On the other hand, if this music is looked at from the perspective of wind instruments, the writing is effective and sonorous.
A puzzle in the Vater unser setting is that the chorale melody, which has a mezzo-soprano range is marked “auf pusaune” (trombone/ sackbut). It just about playable on an alto sackbut, but is higher than any other surviving sackbut parts. In theory a downward transposition would be an option for this piece, but it would produce a very muddy texture, and anyway the evidence suggests that at this date players of loud wind instruments were more likely to transpose music up than down. An outside possibility is that the court wind band still had a slide trumpet from the old days, on which the part would be more comfortable.
The two chorale melodies used in these settings are among the most important in the Lutheran repertoire. The Easter hymn “Christ is erstanden” survives in many settings from the fifteenth century onwards: two rather fine versions by Heinrich Finck have already appeared in our series (EML 273), as well as settings by Isaac (LPM AN1 l) and Lassus (TM36).
In this edition the original note values have been halved. For the sake of convenience the original accidentals are taken as applying to the whole bar, with cautionary accidentals in brackets where necessary. Purely editorial accidentals are printed small above the stave, applying to the one note only.