Dominique Phinot is not a particularly familiar name to music-lovers—even those with a taste for Renaissance polyphony—and not a great deal is known about his short life, but his output entitles him to a prominent place among the Franco-Flemish masters. No less a composer than Palestrina was known to have made a careful study of Phinot’s works, and it has been observed that certain elements in his music anticipate the Venetian polychoral style by several decades.

Indeed, although most of the motet Quanti mercenarii unfolds in a fairly typical "punctum" style (that is, with each phrase of the text introduced by one voice and imitated by the others), it does contain block harmonies like those encountered in later polychoral music: in bars 1-7, where a homophonic phrase in the top three voices is echoed an octave lower by the bottom two voices; and in bars 14-18, where all five parts sing homophonically with a most arresting effect. These are only two of the features which suggest that Phinot may have been treating this text with special care, and applying all his compositional powers to the task of setting it.

Quanti mercenarii and the motet Pater, peccavi with which it is paired, recount the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, a young man who demands his inheritance, leaves his father’s house, and goes to a foreign country where he squanders his wealth on "riotous living." Eventually, reduced to feeding a farmer’s pigs to keep body and soul together, he determines to return home and beg his father’s forgiveness, and to that end he prepares the following speech:

"Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your servants."

And so he heads homeward, but he never gets to make that speech, because (as the Gospel of Luke tells it),

When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compas- sion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the father said to his servants, "Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."

Whether or not Phinot’s attraction to this story of estrangement and forgiveness has any connection with the one fact that is known about him—that he was executed for homosexual practices*—is an interesting matter for speculation; in any case, there are other unusual features about his setting of this text that are worth further exploration.

The first words in Quanti mercenarii are those attributed to the prodigal son at the moment in the story when he "comes to himself":

"How many servants in my father’s house have bread in abundance, yet I perish from hunger!"

Phinot sets this in D Dorian (a third lower than I have pitched it in this edition), so there are no flats (or sharps) in the original key signature. However, when the word pereo ("perish") is reached, the top voices (male altos in the original voicing) encounter a skip from an F to a B-natural in their part. This is the interval of a tritone, so the altos, as all singers in the Renaissance were trained to do in such circumstances, substitute a B-flat for the B-natural. This solves their problem, but it forces the next part down, who have a written B-natural in the same chord, to replace it with a B-flat also, and their doing so necessitates a substitution of an E with an E-flat in their part, which in turn forces another part to do likewise... And so it goes until every note of the scale has been flattened, and we find ourselves in a harmonic wilderness that was almost unthinkable to a Renaissance musician: the key of A-flat minor! There could hardly be a better depiction of the prodigal son's downward spiral from the comfort and luxury of his father's house to the degradation of a pig-sty!

In this edition, I have written out the chromatic substitutions that the singers would have made, both in this extraordinary modulating passage and at the cadences, where seventh degrees were often raised to intensify the effect. Note that the first cadence in this motet, at bars 12-13, is what is sometimes called an "English cadence" or "Tallis sevenths" (there is a second example at bb. 27-8): the soprano line, approaching from above, calls for a raised seventh, B-natural, while the second tenor part, approaching from below, calls for a B-flat. The resulting gorgeous dissonance is further enhanced by momentary clashes between G and A-flat on either side. Arrows between notes, here and elsewhere in the piece, draw attention to semitone dissonances, which should be allowed to pierce the texture like little sparks or flashes of light.

Other editorial intrusions are the vertical and horizontal brackets. The vertical brackets show the puncta or imitative entries. It is important that these be identified, since without them the music could seem like an endless interwoven mass. As in classical music there must be a sense of rest at the end of a phrase, a minute pause or breath between phrases, and a sense of renewed energy as the next phrase begins, so must there be in Renaissance polyphony as well: only here the phrases of the various voices almost never begin or end at the same time; instead they overlap.

The distance between entries is largely what determines the music’s momentum and pacing. Sometimes an entry draws attention to itself by lengthening its first note (cf. the bass part in b.44, the second tenor part in b. 45, the first tenor part at b. 52, and the lengthened and decorated version in the alto part in bb. 48-9 and 57-8). The first tenors repeat their long F# again in bars 60-61, but now as the incipit of a new point of imitation—one which ascends to a G! Phinot often uses the same point (the same text sung to the same or a very similar melody) in three successive cycles of imitation, and the differences in ordering, spacing, and intervallic distances among the three cycles could be a lengthy study unto itself!

The horizontal brackets (along with the long and short accentuation marks I have used occasionally) are an attempt to reduce the tyranny of the bar-lines which modern musicians must have, but which Renaissance musicians did not need and did not have. They show triple groupings; and it is essential that the singers bring out the rhythmic lilt of these groupings if their individual lines are to have the kind of independence that creates lively and pleasing counterpoint. There is one entry in this motet (the alto part at bb. 76-80) which I have marked with an exclamation point in the score, because it is triply grouped throughout: its five bars of 4/4are really six bars of 3/4!

What may be seen as the most idiosyncratic of my editorializings are the suggestions of character I have given for various sections of the piece. But these are neither arbitrary nor fanciful. Some relate to the text being sung, such as the "pensive" opening, followed by the dramatic "declamation" at bar 14. (Part of the dramatic effect of this homophonic statement, incidentally, comes from the fact that its first three words, ego, autem, and hic, all begin with vowel sounds. The apostrophes in front of those words in the score indicate that glottals—not heavy, but clear—are desireable at the start of each.)

Other character descriptions relate more to the musical material. Intense legato is required for the chains of dotted (or tied) half-notes beginning at b. 44 (though each chain is preceded—one might almost say announced—by a distinctly-enunciated and very disjunct et!). A more rhythmic style of delivery is needed for the choppy quarter-notes of bars 61-66. And a certain elegance is suggested by the thinner texture of bb. 67-73, with the tenors using more head-tone as the altos use more chest.

While pasting descriptive words on to sections of a Renaissance motet may be somewhat anachronistic, the notion that each punctum, or point of imitation, should have its own character—not one imposed upon it, but one that arises from the textual and musical material within it—is certainly not out of keeping with the style of this music; indeed, it is a crucial element of its proper performance.

                                                                                                                                          — Stephen Smith, May 2021 

* according to Girolamo Cardano, in his Theonoston (1560)

                                                                         Copyright © 2021 Stephen Smith