The Sacred Choral Music Recording Project

The team at DoveSong.com would like to sponsor the recording of Renaissance sacred music through acquired funding and contribution of time, location, and the services of a recording engineer. The resultant recordings will be made available for no charge in an MP3 library located on a web site dedicated to this purpose.

Background

As stated many times on the DoveSong website, the Renaissance Period produced some of the finest music that Western culture has ever had. This is the choral music of the Catholic church. Based on the liturgy of Gregorian chant, this music was composed to augment the services of the church and was closely tied to chant melodies. It was sung mostly without instruments, although sometimes they were used, doubling the vocal parts. The composers of this music are among the greatest who have ever lived. During the 15th century the great composer Guillaume Dufay excelled, and after him Ockeghem and Obrecht. A high point was reached in the musical art of Josquin des Prez who lived from 1450 to 1521. The apex in Renaissance music was reached in the late 1500s with the music of Tomas Luis de Victoria, Giovanni Palestrina, and Orlando Lasso. The Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli spanned the end of the Renaissance period with the beginning of the Baroque era. 

At the beginning of the 17th Century, the style of music began to change and the a cappella (meaning unaccompanied by instruments) style of Renaissance sacred music began to be considered as old fashioned. Gradually over that century it lost favor as the Baroque style flourished. By the 19th century, it was almost forgotten. By the 20th century, only a few works were performed rather infrequently. These were mostly works that had been made available by contemporary publishing houses. The most interesting fact is that several of the most popular of these works during the mid-20th century actually were not composed by the composers they were attributed to. For example, the Responsories of Palestrina were actually composed by Ignegari, and practically the only two pieces of Victoria published, Ave Maria and Dulcis Memoria, were not composed by Victoria at all. 

A breakthrough in technology occurred with the introduction of the long play record by Columbia Records in 1948. During the 1950s, recordings, mostly made in Europe, began to become available of the music. This trend continued through the rest of the century. When the CD was introduced in the early 1980s, a number of fine recordings began to appear on the market. Choral groups in Europe were formed for the performance of early music. The result is, now there is interest.

The public was completely unaware of the sacred choral music until the popularization of Gregorian chant during the 1990s when a recording by the Monks of Silos became very popular in England and spread to other countries, including the US.

The time has come for the discovery of one of the greatest treasure troves of music ever to be unveiled, the sacred music of the Renaissance.

Availability

Most of the great sacred works of the Renaissance remain unavailable. Even CDs produced in the past 10 years are out of print and have become collector's items. Also, often the same works are recorded over and over. Choirs who have recorded music have not released the music on CD recordings because of the expense and limited market. 

An incredible amount of this great music is completely unavailable. The composer  Orlando di Lasso published his music extensively during his lifetime (a mark of his stature in that first century of printing) and left more than 2000 compositions, a mixture of sacred and secular works. Only a small percentage of these works have been recorded and many great masterpieces remain silent to modern ears. The great Giovanni da Palestrina wrote a large amount of motets, masses, hymns in addition to other sacred compositions, from which only some have been recorded. There is so much more, however. There is the fabulous output of William Byrd, Josquin des Pres, of Dufay and Victoria.

Recording the Music

The DoveSong.com Sacred Choral Recording Project would address the need to make available performances of Renaissance sacred choral music that has never been recorded before. The project would be undertaken by expert choirs anywhere in the world. Recording the music is no longer problematic now that the record label is no longer involved. The actual process is simple. The requirements are good choirs with a love for this music, a room with decent acoustics (many churches will qualify for this). The actual process of recording is extremely simple. Large mixing consoles and stage monitoring are not needed, in fact are frowned upon in the recording of classical music. Excellent recording these days can be accomplished with a laptop computer and a pair of $500 microphones mounted on a single double-mic stand. Once the recordings are on the hard drive, they can be edited, then saved to CDRs, to be later converted into MP3 format using a simple $29.00 program available at any Comp USA store.

Choirs from around the world would be encouraged to join this project. A central database would be set up on DoveSong.com's website into which all known sacred compositions of the Renaissance period would be entered. Once the database is set up and the web pages have been created to access this database, choirs involved in the project would receive a password for accessing the database (however, the contents could be viewed by anyone). Choirs would select compositions that they would be recording, and indicate so in the database. Various stages of the recording process (rehearsing, recording, completed) could be indicated.

The MP3 Project's Computer

Once the recordings have been completed, they would be copied to the server dedicated to the project. This copying process would be made available to the choirs themselves, most likely using a piece of software provided for this process. Information about the recording, the composer, and the composition is entered along with the actual MP3 recording. Once the recording is in the database, the web pages that refer to the library would automatically update, as soon as the directory is modified (when new mp3 files are loaded). In this way, the individual choirs are each involved in the creation of the overall project from start to finish.

New web pages would be created to access the Library of Renaissance Sacred Music which would have its own domain name, separate from that of DoveSong.com. For example, a name such as www.RenaissanceSacredMusic.org, or perhaps something similar.

Thus, through donations of a server computer, Internet access, domain registration, enough money to fund the writing of the software for the new website, and most importantly the commitment from choirs and recording engineers, the great body of sacred music from the Renaissance could gradually become available to anyone in the world with computer access and a sound card.

An Important Project

The team at DoveSong.com recognizes that the advances in technology in just a decade have made projects such as these available for the first time ever. It is up to us, those who understand this and realize how easily we can make a difference, to help in the process of using technology to achieve goals.

The Recording project can go much further than what we have just described. Recordings can be made of great classical music traditions from all cultures in the same manner as we have just described. Additionally, directories for storing midi files can be created.