Pevernage: Cantiones sacrae (1578)

With his Cantiones aliquot sacrae . . . quibus addita sunt elogia nonnulla (1578) Andreas Pevernage issued the fruit of fifteen years’ work as chapel master at the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk. The volume is a remarkable one, both from a musical and a historical standpoint. It is large for a music book of its time, consisting of sixty-three Latin motets, forty-eight of which are "cantiones sacrae," i.e., sacred songs, and twenty-five of which are "elogia," i.e., occasional and homage motets. The sacred pieces fall into two groups, those for the temporale and those for the sanctorale and general use. It is the large body of occasional pieces, though—some written to honor national figures such as Margaret of Parma, the archbishop, and the duke of Croÿ; and others to mark important events in the lives of Pevernage’s fellow citizens—that constitutes the most unusual and historically significant aspect of the volume. This book presents a musical record of a sixteenth-century composer’s activities both in his role as director of church music and as musician to the citizens of his town during the 1560s and ’70s.