Conclusion: graindelavoix (and specially its CD-linernotes!) is like alcohol, coffee and cigarets, all bad for your health but life would be shitty without them....
Bjorn Schmelzer's project of assembling/assimilating into his ensemble voices he finds particularly interesting or particularly 'rough,' voices from different musical backgrounds, and facilitating cross-pollination without enforcing homogeneity has resulted in a sound that reminds me, of all things, of South Chinese Sizhu music, where each specific instrument contributes its own distinct idiom of melodic ornamentation and embellishment to the heterophonic texture. In Sizhu, it works because we always have recourse to the basic melody shared by everyone, so there is no chance of things feeling too fragmented. In the Graindelavoix style, on the other hand, we can't even grasp onto the next best thing for stability, harmony, because even that is mostly obscured by everyone's simultaneous ornaments - we don't get long to revel in that archetypical feeling of 4, 5, or 6-voice concordance ringing through our ears and bodies before the ensemble gets restless and everybody has to keep moving, getting into a little queasy portamento or vibrato or something. It's as if they are worried we will get bored, so they have to spice things up a bit.
By the same token, though, it's often easy for me to hear the Graindelavoix idiom as just impossibly verdant, lush, overgrown in a satisfying way, an overwhelming musical ecology where everything demands and rewards maximum attention all the time, and there are indeed moments when other, more 'normal' performances of Renaissance polyphony seem too dry and sparse by comparison. So on the whole I'm kind of frustrated by it, and by Bjorn Schmelzer too, with his intensely self-conscious promotion of the Graindelavoix aesthetic project as something radical or revolutionary via his extraordinarily thought-provoking liner notes - easily the most interesting liner notes in early music, right? It's just that it all seems a bit forced, a bit artificial, and he always gets to have his cake and eat it too - in one essay, he's found evidence in favor of these 'ugly' (actually clearly beautiful, to anyone who can listen outside the aesthetic confines of 20th-century conservatory culture) types of vocal ornaments in historical sources, but in another essay, he was never trying to recreate historical performance practice anyway, but rather to reanimate the repertoire's capacity for vitality or say something about our contemporary relationship to history; in one essay, he finds 'shock-value' embedded in the music itself, and so performs it shockingly, but in another, he is unmotivated by audience response and perhaps those who are shocked should think about their preconceptions (and remember, in each case the music is performed almost the same way)... But, still, I do understand his argument, in the fundamental mode of leftist critical-theoretical argument, that normative early-music performance practice is just as forced and artificial but in a way that's been naturalized as default without self-awareness, and that the only way out is this kind of deliberate jolting out of complacency... it's a valuable critique, and the results sound nice, but I think unlike other early-music iconoclasts like Marcel Peres or Rebecca Stewart, the Schmelzer idiom doesn't really allow for enough nuance and complexity to feel like anything other than a critique, it doesn't stand on its own, all it can do is parasitically point towards its own sense of difference from the norm. So ultimately all the deliriously, enchantingly dense liner notes, which, really, more than the music, I wouldn't want to be without, don't amount to much more than really effective marketing.
This album in particular feels like a kind of summation, to me, precisely because within the Graindelavoix canon it's kind of a minor work, a soundtrack accompanying an art exhibition if I remember right... Some pieces of some obscure masses, an intriguing connection between concurrent shifts in music and architecture, yea, that's Graindelavoix... The Missa Praeter rerum seriem, though, is based on one of my all time favorite Josquin motets, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to hear that texture treated to the Graindelavoix aesthetic.
