For the last Saturday of the Christmas season, I wanted to share this splendid recording of a motet which I recently discovered by the Franco-Flemish composter Jean Mouton. It is a setting of a very ancient text which appears in the Roman Breviary as the eighth responsory for the feast of the Circumcision. There is also an equally ancient version of the same words as an antiphon, which is not in the Roman Office, but is found in many other Uses; e.g. at Sarum, it was sung with the Magnificat in the Little Office of Our Lady from Christmas until the Purification.
Nesciens mater Virgo virum peperit sine dolore Salvatorem saeculorum; ipsum Regem angelorum sola Virgo lactabat, ubere de caelo pleno. (The Virgin Mother, knowing not man, bore without pain the Savior of the ages; alone as virgin did She nurse the very King of the angels at a breast made full from heaven.)Jean Mouton, whose real last name was de Hollinge, was born ca. 1459 in northern France, in the region now known as the Pas-de-Calais; when he was young, he studied music alongside Josquin des Prez. He was ordained a priest around 1483, and served as a chorister and music director in various places, until 1502, when he began to work at the chapel of Queen Anne of Brittany, the wife of King Louis XII of France. Upon her death, he became official composer for the court of King Louis, continuing under his son Francis I until his death in 1522. His body of work includes 15 Masses and over 100 motets. The praise of his friend Josquin spread his reputation in Italy, and he became the second most copied and imitated composer of the period after Josquin himself. This particular piece is known from a manuscript in the Medici library in Florence, a collection of motets which Mouton presented as a wedding gift to Leo X’s nephew Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, in 1518.
Here is another polyphonic version from the mighty Schola Hungarica, sung as an antiphon with Psalm 129, which is sung in alternating chant and polyphony.
