Kyrie

Kyrie
Music for Quiet Meditation

Timeless music from the early church, its rites and its rituals, creates an unhurried atmosphere of calm. Focusing on the Sarum Rite, vocal plainchant and instrumental music combine in a fine evocation in sound of the medieval world.

The Greek words of Kyrie eleison ( Lord have mercy ) have been set to music almost from the moment when they became an essential part of the Christian liturgy of the Mass or Holy Communion. The symbolic three-fold repetition of the invocation of Lord and then of Christ and a repeat of the initial Lord produce nine lines in all, and thus quite a substantial framework upon which to hang a complex musical structure. In fact the concept of this A-B-A form has underpinned most Western music for a thousand years.

As Kyrie eleison became a familiar and frequently used text it quickly acquired decoration and elaboration. Just as the medieval builders decorated the arches and window traceries of their buildings with ornamentation and theological explanation, so the musicians and composer developed and ornamented their original texts, adding words and music to the original which related to specific events in the Church calendar. The Kyrie eleison was used daily in church services, but it soon came almost always to have these extra words and thus went from being an Ordinary (an every day unchanging text, like the psalms) to being a Proper , always associated with a specific liturgical time such as Advent, Christmas or Easter.

This recording includes all nine Proper Kyries from the Sarum Rite, a specifically English version of the universal texts and music of the church which centred around the way things were done in Salisbury cathedral an elsewhere in Southern England in medieval times. In addition we have recorded here in their entirety, (we believe for the first time) a group of Kyrie Squares . A square is a single line of music (as is plainchant) but which is thought to have derived from a pre-existing polyphonic piece. The square is often developed from the bass line of a four- or five-part motet. The square is extracted from its original piece and can then be used as a new single line upon which to base a further new composition. For this recording we have been content to use improvisations on these melodies (performed on a selection of instruments by Le Basile) as prefaces to the melodies themselves in unadorned form, but in medieval and renaissance times many of these themes were used by composers as the starting point for very significant and elaborate works.

These two main groups of music are punctuated on the recording by a further series of Kyries which have survived as instrumental works in a variety of English and Continental manuscripts.

Number of Discs: 1

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