Music Review: Missa Papae Marcelli by Palestrina

A Silent Music

By Patricia Saunders

It came in like a quiet, smooth stream, except that it wasn’t a stream, it was music. More precisely, it was the Missa Papae Marcelli, a musical setting of the Roman Catholic mass by the 16th-century Italian composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. In each soaring phrase, Palestrina blended sound and silence with such perfection, that my mind transcended all past experience, all familiar thought patterns, and rose towards the vast space beyond the clouds. I became increasingly free of worry, attachment, pain, limitation, and age. Instead, I was unbounded, as if the power of small, resonating tones had suddenly propelled me into an undiscovered yet curiously recognizable ocean that washed me clean of anything holding me back from fulfillment.

The Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy defined music as the “shorthand of emotion” meaning that music needs no interpretation for its meaning and can open the heart to emotions that lie dormant or frustrated. But while opening the heart to deep emotions is a role of music, it is not the whole picture. For me, the ultimate goal of music is to fuse together all sense of motion, all sense of understanding and “Being,” and facilitate the experience of a state where there is no separation between each individual and the rest of the universe.
​
Numerous musicians, writers, poets, and artists of all genres have explored the possibility that there is something greater than themselves. All they have needed to express this was a means to pass into an infinite field of consciousness that refines the emotions, increases creativity, gives clarity to the mind, and contentment. The field of the infinite is expressed in boundaries but cannot be confined in humanly conceived forms. It transcends manifestation, form, the endless sequence of opposites, which cannot be reconciled by reason but only through intuition.

The greatest moments of great music reach beyond opposites. They reach beyond the duality of major and minor keys and the often artificial division between happiness and sadness. The fusion of opposites, giving rise to equanimity, permeates the spirit of the Missa Papae Marcelli and we absorb this equanimity when we listen to it. The melodies, being devoid of drama, have an evenness and inner peace that must be a reflection of Palestrina’s mind because composers can never be separated from their music.

Palestrina’s music is not simplistic, but it does express simplicity. It communicates the presence of a greater reality beyond the small boundaries of personal existence and reminds us that deep down, everything is connected. Everything is a reflection of an immense quality of unity that allows different cultures, races, and religions to interact like colorful mosaics on the surface, yet exist in union with each other at their source.

The essence of music, although expressed in a field of diversity, lies beyond sound. It is the expression of an enormous field of intelligence that knows everything it is and everything it is going to be. In its harmonies shines the light of knowledge, extending beyond all phenomena we experience in the material world. In every resonating frequency, our feelings are expressed with each rhythmic heartbeat and restless ripple of time. Supreme music, such as the Missa Papae Marcelli, reflects the pulse that never changes, the eternal frequency that transcends our small selves and flows on in a melting stream that is the eternal play of life.
​
Recommended version: Missa Papae Marcelli, by Palestrina. Sung by The Tallis Scholars and conducted by Peter Phillips. 
​