Hubert Waelrant. (Music Reviews).(Liber Sextus Sacrarum Cantionum)

Hubert Waelrant. Liber sextus sacrarum cantionum. Edited by Robert Lee Weaver. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 125.) Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, Inc., c2001. [Introd., p. vii-xiv; texts and trans., p. xv-xx; 4 plates; score, 142 p.; crit. report, p. 143-47. ISBN 0-89579-490-X. $73.]

Until quite recently, the works of Hubert Waelrant (ca. 1517-1595) were unjustly neglected by students of Renaissance music. Now, thanks to Robert Lee Weaver's new edition of an important collection of five-and six-voice motets published by Waelrant during the 1550s, the Liber sextus sacrarum cantionum, we can at last appreciate the composer's musical skills in depth. The Liber sextus also makes a fitting point of entry for scholars and performers keen to learn more about Waelrant's career and his place in the broader context of musical life in Antwerp during the middle years of the sixteenth century. As Weaver tells us in his introductory remarks, the Liber sextus was probably the last in a series of books (variously devoted to motets, French psalm settings, chansons, and madrigals by a range of midcentury masters) that Waclrant issued in a brief partnership from around 1554 to 1558 with Jean De Laet, a prolific Antwerp artisan who also published a good deal of other music, and much else besides. (For a com plete catalog of their work together and apart, see Weaver's A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalog of the Music Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de Laet, Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, 73 [Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1994].) The Liber sextus is noteworthy among their collaborative efforts as the only book of motets devoted exclusively to works composed by Waelrant. It thus stands as a sacred companion of sorts to Waelrant's secular collection Il primo libro de madrigali e canzoni francezi issued by De Laet and Waelrant in 1558. The two sets of partbooks share some of the same paper types, a connection that prompts Weaver to assign the Liber sextus, which lacks any other indication of publication date, to the same period as the secular collection. (A complete modern edition of Il primo libro de madrigali e canzoni francezi, edited by Gerald R. Hoekstra, appears as vol. 88 of Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance [Madison, Wise.: A-R Editions, 1991].)

Weaver's edition of the Liber sextus adheres to the customarily high editorial standards that readers will find in other volumes of the Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance series. Typography is exemplary, with clear placement of texts, judicious suggestions for musica ficta, indications for original clefs, and ranges for individual vocal parts. The introductory materials include observations on the source, in this case a lone surviving complete copy of the partbooks now in Stockholm's Statens musikbibliotek (Weaver could not have known that the Brandeis University Libraries recently acquired a copy of the altus partbook, bound in 1571 with fifteen other recently published motet collections, including Waelrant's books 1-5; see http://www.library.brandeis.edu/SpecialCollections / Collections / gorham. html [accessed 2 April 2002]); the original audience and dedicatee; thoughts on Waelrant's selection of sacred texts (which Weaver provides with full English translations); and a discussion of the p ieces in the collection within the stylistic context of the motet as it was heard in midcentury Antwerp. The four facsimile reproductions from the Liber sextus and manuscript sources of the motets complement the critical report, which details the differences between the principal source anti the two sixteenth-century manuscripts containing some of the same pieces.

Why is Waelrant's Liber sextus so worthy of further study? In significant measure, simply on account of the sheer appeal of the music found here. Anyone who takes time to sing or play through these motets will discover a richly varied palette of ...