Renaissance Sacred Music
Newbie Corner

For those those of you who have not experienced the joys of this music, we ask you to be patient.

I remember well the first time that I really tried to get a grasp of what this music was all about. It was 1970, and I had been really listening to Bach’s Cantatas. They were for me, the end-all of sacred music.

I had a dream one night. I was standing in the record-listening room of the public library in San Francisco, where I was living at the time, and I was looking at a record album of music by the renaissance composer Palestrina. I had read about this composer in a music history class that I had taken in college, but I had never really listened to his music. A voice in the dream said "This music composed before the time of Bach is even more powerful and spiritual than that of Bach."

The dream had a powerful effect on me. I went to the library and found an LP of Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass, and checked it out on loan. I took it home and listened to it. In fact, I listened to it for an hour or so each day. The music didn’t seem to have any ‘meaning.’ It seemed unchanging, boring, but because of the dream, I kept on.

Then one day, all of a sudden, I began ‘hearing’ the music for the first time. The music of this mass opened up to me in a powerful way. I never thought renaissance sacred music boring again.

                                  Don Robertson

MP3s

Renaissance MP3s are available on the Dovesong Web Site:
-> Renaissance MP3s in the DoveSong Music Library

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Missa Pange Linqua
Westminster Cathedral Choir, James O'Donnell, director
Hyperion CDA66614

Orlando di Lasso

Regina Coeli and seasonal motets
The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, directed by Richard Marlow
Conifer 75606-51230-2

Music of Tomas Luis de Victoria
Saint Clement's Choir, Philadelphia, Peter Richard Conte, director
Dorian DIS-80146

Opus Musicum and Missa super "Sancta Maria"
Huelgas Ensemble, Paul Van Nevel, director
Sony Classical SK 64305

Prince of Music
Paraclete Press
Orleans MA 02653
(800) 451-5006