Early Music Society

The Cambridge Society for Early Music presented an exceptionally pleasing and instructive concert last night. Composed entirely of music from the French Renaissance, the program combined a variety of instrumental and vocal works to illustrate a single aspect of a limited but brilliant period in musical history.

This aspect was the art of developing a single musical idea into two, three, or sometimes half a dozen completely separate pieces. Although working known themes into new forms is hardly unique to any one period, the French Renaissance, as the Society's program showed, abounded in parodies, copies, and derivations--perhaps more so than any period since. This characteristic is evident in forms as divergent as the country dance and the mass; and the Society's concert included examples of derivation and original in both.

In the first half of the program, a five-member instrumental ensemble performed two representative suites from the period, by Des Prez and Gervaise, together with four collections of varied arrangements. The basis for one such complex of derivations was de Sermisy's "Tant que Vivray," done first on recorder and harpsichord, then harpsichord alone, and finally in two different versions for the organ. But this was not a simple presentation of theme and developments worked into a unified composition by a single composer, for de Sermisy himself wrote none of the arrangements performed last night.

The instruments of the orchestra were not the same 400 years ago, and this fact was responsible for one of the concert's most definite successes--an interesting novelty in sound and tone--but also for its only trace of weakness. Proficiency on such instruments as the cromorne (a woodwind) or the viele (a string about the size of the violin but held like a cello) is not often in demand, and so it is not surprising that the Cambridge ensemble should impress one more by vivacious spirit of performance than by craftsmanship of execution.

After the intermission, however, the audience was on much more familiar ground, as the Harvard Glee Club sang a motet by Brumel and a "parody mass" based upon it by Des Pres. The result, as seems to be usual with the Glee Club, was flawless.