The bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven adorned countless medieval altarpiece paintings, emboldened legions of mendicant preachers, and assured the faith of the multitudes. Mary taken to heaven bridged the gap between humble human flesh and the divine person of Christ, offering pious advocacy with her son and simultaneous sympathy for the sinner. Composer Antoine Brumel honored the Virgin by writing a lengthy and elegant motet for the feast of her Assumption (August 15th), Ave virgo gloriosa. The text for this motet, one of his longest, is an extended liturgical poem in sequence form for that feast consisting of 16 three-line stanzas in eight pairs. Its imagery invokes a wealth of devotional titles for the Virgin, from the mundane ("pious mother," "precious gem"), to the liturgical ("star of the sea," "to whom our tears breathe"), to the Biblically allusive ("shoot of Jesse," "throne of Solomon"), and even to the classical ("end of the [river] Lethe"). Brumel carefully observes both the structure and the spirit of his poetic source. He marks the conclusion of each poetic tercet with a strong cadence, and often exposes the complete rhyme of a stanza with internal cadences at the line breaks. This structure foregrounds the poetic litany of Marian devotion. His tenor voice gives occasional hints of quoting a borrowed chant melody, though it remains unidentified. Brumel reflects the variety of titles with a variety of musical textures and techniques. They include a mixture of imitative openings, paired duets (both a highly current musical style and an appropriate reflection of the parallelism of the poetic form), and emphatic homophony. Such chordal writing serves both the rhetorical effect of strengthening the delivery of particular text lines and also heightening the musical effect of two meter changes at the end of each half. For the final amen, Brumel executes a contrapuntal tour de force in a canonic outworking of the same short, syncopated motive in a sequence that cascades through all four voices.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi