I also suggest that Pärt’s “Magnificat” exemplifies the telos for his music, a goal that is nothing short of union with God. I establish it as a landmark piece in Part's developmental history by virtue of the mastery of technique in which the composer exhibits more musical control over the tintinnabuli processes he invented than before. I focus on his setting of the “Magnificat” (1989), one of his most popular and frequently performed works.

In this chapter I describe Part as the 'quiet evangelist,' a man whose music is promulgating Christianity through his settings of Christian texts, but in a manner that is both modest and self-effacing. He does not attempt to proselytize for Christianity, but he is an evangelist, taking seriously the church's mandate to spread the word of God. 1935) is an Orthodox Christian whose music proclaims his faith. This study will explore the analytical problems in the interpretation of an admittedly transitional work, the first of its kind, bringing to the surface myriad aesthetic concerns from different epochs and displaying different musical organizational methods.Īrvo Pärt (b. Thus, the scholar is faced with a fundamental methodological question: Should a work's stylistic, modal and melodic cohesion be analyzed when its composer was perhaps not consciously interested in them? Machaut’s setting employs isorhythm and both contrapuntal and homophonic polyphonic styles, is set in two modes and foreshadows many later fifteenth-century techniques such as the use of a cantus firmus and head motifs without adopting them directly.

Most contemporary scholars believe this setting was not composed as a unified work, but rather was composed as separate pieces for various occasions and later compiled into a single work overseen by Machaut himself.

An important question for students and scholars is whether the Mass was conceived as a coherent work or was a mere assemblage of settings of the various sections, compiled for some special occasion or for regular liturgical use. Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame is thus the first documented setting of a complete Mass Ordinary by a single composer. Machaut's consistent use of his own distinctive musical language, combining predominant stylistic techniques of his day with unique melodic features, provides the modern scholar with a number of compelling challenges, especially in the interpretation of what is generally thought to be the first polyphonic setting of the Mass Ordinary by a single composer, the Messe De Nostre Dame. The fourteenth-century French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut is Western Europe's first example of what we may term the 'conscious composer,' a composer aware of his entire output and therefore interested in compiling and preserving it.

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