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• Pange Lingua (5 settings c. 1500)

Pange Lingua (5 settings c. 1500)

for 4 voices or instruments.

The hymn Pange lingua, associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi, seems to have inspired a great number of musicians to give of their best. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the most influential setting was probably the wonderful Missa Pange Lingua of Josquin des Près, extracts of which appear in manuscript and printed anthologies of the subsequent decades.
The pieces printed here are from German sources compiled mainly at the very beginning of the 16th century: the Codex of Nicolas Apel (Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 1494), MS 40021 of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and the keyboard tablature of Fridolin Sicher (Stiftsbibliothek, St. Gallen, Switzerland). The final three-part setting is a bit earlier in style, going back to the Glogauer Liederbuch, which was compiled around 1470. In the great German turn-of-the-century anthologies, hymn settings by such distinguished musicians as Heinrich Finck figure prominently. Typically they have the plainsong melody in the tenor part (though sometimes it is in the discantus instead, as in no. 2 here), and have rather rhythmically elaborate counterpoints in the remaining voices. Although it is likely that most of these settings would have been performed most frequently by unaccompanied voices, they do work very well as instrumental pieces also, and of course many survive in keyboard tablatures.
In this edition the original note values have been halved, except for the Glogauer piece (no. 5), from an earlier generation, in which they have been quartered. In no. 1, the transcription had to be “realised” a little, by replacing short rests in the original with dots or notes tied across the bar. German tablature versions of polyphonic pieces almost invariably notate tied and dotted rhythms by rests: in notational terms this is actually quite a sensible and economical way of doing it, though it looks rather odd when transcribed literally.
The second setting has the even-numbered verses underlaid in the original, on the assumption that the odd-numbered verses were sung to plainsong. In the remaining settings it is first verse that was underlaid. Obviously performers should be flexible about this: one could, for instance, perform settings 2-4 to verses 2, 4 and 6 respectively, to make a nice sequence.