Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week by Robert L. Kendrick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week by Robert L. Kendrick Alanna Ropchock Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week. By Robert L. Kendrick. (Music and the Early Modern Imagination.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. [x, 337 p. ISBN 9780253011565 (hard-cover), $50; ISBN 9780253011626 (e-book), $42.99.] Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. In early modern Catholicism, the three days before Easter—collectively known as the Triduum—comprised a solemn marathon of rituals that awakened the senses, mind, and soul. Robert Kendrick opens Singing Jeremiah by describing the Triduum as “the longest single commemoration, collective and personal, of the central events of salvation” (p. 1). Kendrick’s book, however, is not a general overview of Holy Week rituals, but rather a study that isolates a genre of Triduum music from roughly 1550–1750: the Canonical Hours of Matins and Lauds, which were performed as a combined service for the days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. These combined Hours were known as Tenebrae, meaning darkness or shadows. The name comes from the central role that light (or lack thereof) played during the services; these Hours were typically performed in the late afternoon on the eve of their prescribed liturgical day when natural daylight was fading. Moreover, a defining feature of these Hours was the gradual extinguishing of candles as each psalm was sung. The title of this book refers to the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which played a prominent role during Tenebrae as Lessons alongside psalms and other prescribed liturgical texts. Singing Jeremiah provides a panoptic tour of early modern Tenebrae services in the regions that practiced the combined Hours, namely continental Europe and its outposts. Kendrick gives considerable attention to Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and certain areas of the Austro-Germanic lands, but his survey of Tenebrae also includes repertories from places such as Prague, Paris, and the New World. The scope of composers represented in this study is remarkable: Emilio de’ Cavalieri, Thomas Crecquillon, Leonardo Leo, and Nicolò Jommelli are only a few examples. The treatment of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Tenebrae music in chapter 6 (“European Tenebrae c. 1680”) is particularly superb, and the poster boys of high Renaissance polyphony—Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Orlando di Lasso—also make appearances in earlier chapters. Kendrick’s survey of music and primary accounts associated with Tenebrae from this astonishing array of regions and repertories is not without a directed goal. His intent is to view the music, texts, and ritual of Tenebrae through lenses of social meaning and personal experience. He contends that a thorough understanding of Tenebrae encompasses not only written documents such as music scores and liturgical books, but the actual execution of the music, the gestures and movements associated with the ritual, and last but not least, the behavior of the participants (p. 2). The result is a skillfully crafted monograph in which the [End Page 88] author weaves together strands of music analysis, exegesis, and social and political histories in order to convey the early modern concept of Tenebrae to our twenty-first-century imaginations. The first two chapters provide an overview of the ritual and describe how early modern Catholics would have understood the Tenebrae texts, which varied from place to place until the introduction of Roman liturgical books around the turn of the seventeenth century. Medieval allegorical interpretations played a role in textual meaning, but, as Kendrick points out, so did aspects of daily life such as the basic human need for food: the Triduum occurred during a period of intense fasting and equally intense liturgical activity, but also during a time of the year—early spring—when food was generally scarce. The verses in Lamentations that address famine and Jerusalem’s yearning for bread had a “literal parallel in the bodies of the [Tenebrae] participants (p. 25).” Chapter 3 (“Devotion, Models, Circulation, 1550–1600”) focuses on late sixteenth-century Italian Tenebrae repertoire from a variety of institutions including the Vatican and both old and new religious orders. In a contrast of locale and institutional venue, chapter 4 (“Dynastic Tenebrae”) considers sixteenth-century Tenebrae music from European courts, primarily those of the...