Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I was raised Catholic. I still consider myself practicing, but while I'm away at school I'm honestly not very good at it. Sundays come and go and I spend the whole day resting, cleaning, and catching up on homework. Every Lent I try to remedy this; I tell myself I'm going to start going to Mass again, and I do, even though it usually fades away after. I'm doing the same this year. I honestly do try, but realistically I'm just too scatterbrained for it to really stick when I'm doing it alone.

Why talk religion in an arts blog? Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Lent, for non-Catholics, is a period of forty days before Easter, and is intended as a period of intense spiritual renewal. In other words, you repent, you fast, you repent some more, and you genuinely try to be a better person. It's essentially the religious atmosphere of the whole middle ages crammed into about five weeks.

The reason I bring this up is that Lent, being a time when you're supposed to improve yourself, is a perfect time to expose yourself to new and different types of music, suitable for all your meditative needs. (Okay, okay. It's an excuse for me to try and convince you that chant isn't boring. I have ulterior motives.)

If traditional or Gregorian chant isn't your cup of tea, don't stop reading yet. What plainsong or monophonic chant did in the middle ages, Renaissance composers made much more interesting. Most relgious music is actually like this. For example, Mozart's Requiem mass is based on the traditional Gregorian Requiem mass. On top of borrowing the text, adaptations of these chants usually retain at least some aspects of the original tune.

The most obvious one that comes to mind for me is Alma Redemptoris Mater. The plainsong version is here. (It's not the best performance I've ever heard, but it was either this or the sheet music, and for the moment it's better just to hear it.) Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (most commonly known as Palestrina, for the city where he lived) did one of my favorite arrangements of it. You can see a performance of it on YouTube. If you listen to both, you'll notice right away that the first six notes are the same. After that they diverge, but you can still hear echoes of the original throughout. Tomas Luis de Victoria also did one.

Apparantly musical integrity wasn't quite as popular in the middle ages and renaissance, though. One of my favorite Palestrina pieces isn't even his. Adoramus Te has been circulating since the nineteenth century, according to CPDL.org, and borrows the soprano line from Francesco Roselli's Adoramus Te. I'm not sure how accurate all of this information is, since no sources are cited and because I remember hearing something different about it, but they do make the sheet music for both pieces available as PDF files, and the soprano lines match up.

My favorite Victoria piece... well, pieces... are not actually related to Lent at all, and are O Magnum Mysterium and the mass based on it, called "Missa de O Magnum Mysterium." "O Magnum Mysterium" is actually about the nativity. It really is difficult to choose, though, and Magnum only comes ahead by about a hair because of my own sentimental attachment to it.

It should be noted here that Palestrina and Victoria are two of my absolute favorite composers. Both are listed on www.classiccat.com, which is a directory of free classical music recordings across the internet. Most of these recordings are done by amateur, church, community, and university ensembles, but a lot of them are quite good. Check them out. Even if you're not religious, polyphonic chant is simply gorgeous and is definitely worth a listen.