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• L´Homme Armé (4 settings)

L´Homme Armé (4 settings)

for 4 instruments.

The “L´homme armé” melody had an extraordinary vogue among composers of sacred music towards the end of the fifteenth century; almost every self-respecting composer of the time composed a mass on it. However, the earliest use of the tune in a polyphonic work is probably the setting by Robert Morton (d. ca. 1475), which was originally in three parts, but has survived in the present four-part version - almost certainly intended for instrumental performance - in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. And Morton was not the only musician to use the melody in a secular context; the composer Johannes Japart, who seems to have specialised in combining two or more melodies in a single piece, presents it in our third setting together with another popular song, “Il est de bonne heure né”. Our second setting here is headed “Falsum” in the single source, which may be a reference to the modal irregularity in the imitative opening. In some ways the oddest setting is the apparently very simple one of Josquin; what is strange is that the notation in the original is unnecessarily complicated - the piece is written in triple time with a dot after the first note in each piece and a verbal instruction which implies that all subsequent notes should be dotted. So far nobody has been able to transcribe the piece in a form that is musically (as opposed to notationally) different from the simple version printed here.
The original note values have been halved in no. 1 and quartered in the remaining pieces. Editorial accidentals appear in the usual way, printed small above the stave, applying to a single note only.
These pieces can be performed on recorders, or other wind instruments, or viols. Settings 2 and 3 here are probably best approached almost as virtuoso numbers, with tempi as fast as is compatible with the quite elaborate syncopations that occur from time to time.