Sounds of Centuries Mix in Quartet’s Debut

Crazy times often inspire crazy music, and 14th century music is a very good example of that. The most advanced musical thought was in France, and so, too, were the more liberal factions of the Catholic church. In 1378, the church actually split, with one pope in Rome and another in Avignon. Music, of course, reacted, and its response to the Great Schism was what the Orlando Consort explored Friday night when this superb quartet of fine British early music vocalists made its West Coast debut in the rotunda of UCLA’s Powell Library.

The program, titled “Popes and Antipopes,” was part of the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series that the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College presents, and that meant that part of the interest was to experience a meeting of music and architecture. The Romanesque library, with its handsome brick and lovely tiles so long taken for granted by UCLA undergraduates (signs warn students not to hog the computers for e-mail), looks better than it has in many years, thanks to an extensive post-earthquake restoration that has removed decades’ worth of clutter (but made the octagonal rotunda look slightly stucco-ish). More to the point, that ceiling projects the sound of unaccompanied high male voices splendidly, with just the right amount of echo to give them substance.

Also to the point, clutter, cleansing, even a hint of tackiness, were part of the spirit of music in the 14th century, a time of messy transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It is often found useful to view the 14th century with 20th century eyes, finding societal decay six centuries apart not all that different. Certainly in music, the most intricate motets--in which each voice sings a different text in a different language to a different music in a different meter, all woven together through arcane uses of mathematical procedures--seem linked with the avant-garde of the 1950s. Both periods reacted the same way to such inaccessible complexity by simplifying music, giving it a more narrative structure.

The Orlando toured the period chronologically, from before the Great Schism to its resolution in the 15th century. It began with elaborate motets in praise of Pope Clement VI, who surrounded himself with the most brilliant French and Italian musicians in Avignon. One, “Petre Clemens/Lugentium Siccentur” by Philippe de Vitry, is a particularly wild flight of fancy for three voices, its two simultaneous Latin texts exultant in prophecy, bellicose in its call for triumph over heathens and inclusive enough to appropriate Greek gods.

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The Avignon cardinals lived luxuriously and were connoisseurs. But their hedonism happened to include the love of sophisticated music of grand ornament and deliciously weird dissonances that sounds modern even now. With the Great Schism, the Roman edicts were for more direct, simpler, less worldly music. The Orlando went back and forth between these musics, a queasy ride on waves of wildly experimental crests moderated by basins of sweet-sounding caution. At the end, two lovely, resonant motets by the 15th century Burgundian master Gillaume Dufay settled the evening’s musical conflicts, just as many composers today are attempting right now in the compositions of millennial symphonies.

Fine as they are, the four singers of the consort--Robert Harre-Jones, a sterling alto, the tenors Charles Daniels and Angus Smith and baritone Donald Greig--could seem a bit stern, tied to the page in the most difficult works. But they can also soar free as songbirds, as they do on their latest Archiv recording of alluring Machaut chansons, “Dreams in the Pleasure Garden.”